Brief
Neutrino flavor changes may tip dying stars toward explosion or black‑hole collapse
Researchers modelled 195 collapsing stars and found that including neutrino flavor conversion altered the outcome in many cases.
By Felo News Desk · Published
Computer simulations by a team at the University of Copenhagen indicate that neutrino flavor conversion – the swapping of neutrino types – can influence whether a massive star explodes as a supernova or collapses directly into a black hole, scitechdaily.com reported on Oct. 3.
What happened
The researchers built a simplified model that allowed them to run 195 simulations of stars ranging from nine to 120 solar masses. For each star they ran a pair of simulations: one that included neutrino flavor conversion and one that omitted it. They also varied the density at which the conversion began, then recorded whether the model produced a supernova explosion or continued collapsing toward a black hole.
What the reports add
According to the article, the inclusion of flavor conversion changed the fate of a notable fraction of the simulated stars, with some that would have formed black holes instead exploding, and vice‑versa. The study highlights that previous supernova models have typically ignored this effect because fully accounting for flavor conversion demands extreme computational resources.
What was said
"We have long known that neutrinos can switch between different flavors. But we generally assumed that this had no effect on the outcome of the explosion itself. Our new research findings suggest that this flavor can tell us something about the star’s fate," said Mariam Gogilashvili, a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute and lead author of the study.
"Simulating the death of a massive star is something that is pretty much at the frontier of what we can do computationally at the moment. That is because it is a problem involving a great deal of physics and it is extremely expensive computationally," added Irene Tamborra, professor at the Niels Bohr Institute and co‑author.
How it came about
Supernovae have long been recognised as key sites for dispersing heavy elements that later form new stars and planets. While neutrinos are known to carry away most of the energy during core collapse, their ability to change flavor was previously thought to be irrelevant for the explosion mechanism. The Copenhagen team’s simplified approach made it possible to explore this previously neglected factor across a large sample of stellar masses, offering a new angle on a long‑standing problem in stellar astrophysics.
Key facts
- The study modelled 195 collapsing stars with masses from 9 to 120 solar masses. (scitechdaily.com)
- Simulations compared runs with and without neutrino flavor conversion. (scitechdaily.com)
- Including flavor conversion altered the explosion outcome for a significant number of cases. (scitechdaily.com)
- Neutrino flavor conversion has been computationally expensive to model in past supernova studies. (scitechdaily.com)
- Lead author Mariam Gogilashvili is a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute. (scitechdaily.com)
Sources
- [1] scitechdaily.com — originally reported as “Ghost Particles May Decide Whether a Dying Star Explodes or Becomes a Black Hole”
