Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video]

pcdavid 461 points 77 comments March 03, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

JKCalhoun

(Typo in the title.)

Brajeshwar

Welcome back. One of my staple YouTube Subscriptions. I’m today years old learning that the light that we actually see on earth today came out 100s of thousands of years ago.

cleandreams

Wonderful to hear. Her long Covid was heartbreaking (saw the videos). I hope she gets stronger and stronger! Welcome back!

jwr

So happy to see her back! It was a grueling journey and we were all crossing our thumbs, waiting and hoping…

ayhanfuat

Such amazing news. She’s been bedridden due to long Covid. Got better a few times but after a while attacks came back. Both she and her husband showed great strength. So happy to see a new milestone.

roelschroeven

Dianna got better sometime last year as well, just in time to fly home to Hawaii for her father's funeral (yeah ...), but she got a lot worse again later. I really hope things will keep going well for Dianna now. Props for her husband who's been incredible of taking care of her.

human_hack3r

Happy to see her back to science!

nickandbro

Is this long Covid or depression or Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)? Because in her earlier videos she talks about becoming bed-bound again due to her emotional state after finding news her friend who had a similar condition died.

alabhyajindal

BOOM! Let's go

jesse_dot_id

Long COVID is a nightmare. I'm glad she's able to fight it off enough to do the things she loves again.

gosub100

I can't remember where I heard of it, but decades ago there was another neutrino detection center, also in Japan I think, that had those vacuum tube detectors, but care wasn't taken in systems design. One of them broke and the implosion caused the neighbors to break. Leading to a catastrophic of almost all the sensors! I feel bad for them, I'm sure someone here knows the exact name and date. But man, what a tough lesson to learn. Edit: on another note, way to go on your recovery Diana. We've been rooting for you.

legitster

It's really cool to see her back and making videos again. After seeing her status updates 2 years ago I was honestly really concerned she would be gone for good. It sounds like she had a serious case of myalgic encephalomyelitis brought on by Covid. Part of why we know so little about these types of conditions is they are incredibly unfair. Women are 4x as likely to have some sort of constant fatigue disorder as men, and you see this reflected in literature going back centuries when describing women who just flat out disappear from public life. One of the things about being bedridden for a long period of time is that there is a high risk of becoming more or less permanently bedridden. Especially if you have a chronic fatigue syndrome, you become weaker and any activity can retrigger fatigue. So her pushing herself to make new content sustainably is important very encouraging.

dejongh

What an amazing storyteller. I will watch many more of her videos. I hope she will make many more videos ♥

ck2

video about her long-covid battle and recovery here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqeIeIcDHD0 (caution for those currently sick as it's a rough watch at first)

shadowgovt

One of my favorite bits of astrophysics trivia is that the neutrino detection experiments serve as an early-warning system for supernovae, to allow astronomers to prioritize telescope time and swing the scopes around to see the first visible-light and radio signals of the event. This is because the electromagnetic energy of the supernova can take hours to force its way through all the star's mass to the surface when the core dies, but the gravitational crush turning protons and electrons into neutrons releases a massive burst of neutrinos in every direction. And the neutrinos are so weakly-interacting with the matter in the star that they get out first. Then, a million years later, arrive in our solar system at such a high fraction of lightspeed that they presage the coming electromagnetic shock-front because the constant difference in escape time between neturinos, which are particles of matter , getting out of the star without interacting with anything and the electromagnetic waves moving through the star's matter at a fraction of lightspeed created a gap that the light never caught up to. The universe is a profoundly wild place.

flux3125

According to science video thumbnails on YT, nothing should be possible

dylan604

I think Super-K is the place with water so pure that it will leach pretty much anything which was discovered when one of the tech's hair got wet while leaning over the water. The hair looked bleached after it went into the water. My googlfu is not finding anything to confirm though

olivia-banks

This is fantastic news! Long COVID is awful, so I'm glad to see that she's recovering, if only incrementally.

hinkley

How much of the mass of the universe is neutrinos?

dotancohen

The video mentions that this image was taken during the night time. If the neutrinos do not interact with the entire Earth on their way through, then how do they interact with the sensor?

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