If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, why do neutrinos get out of the Sun faster than light?

Answer 1

Pretty much NOTHING can stop a neutrino; even a light years thickness of solid lead would only stop one in a billion of them, that is how weak the Weak nuclear force is. Where as pretty much EVERYTHING will stop and slow down a photon, that is how much stronger the Electromagnetic force is in comparison.

Both particles are created in the fusion heart of the sun, the matter is so dense and reactions are so ferocious that it takes the average photon 15 million years to make it to the sun's surface. Neutrons, because they do not interact hardly, escape with ease.

Answer 2

Your answer is in your question -- the part about how they "get out of the Sun faster than light".

The "speed of light" is not a constant in all materials. Light can go slowly through dense materials. The "speed limit" speed of light we think of is its speed in a vacuum.

Photons (particles of light with mass) are generated deep in the sun, in a very dense, turbulent environment. It takes them a very long time to reach the surface after bouncing around in there. Think of a marble in a bowl of rice - it gets to the bottom, but not as fast as if the rice wasn't there.

Neutrinos have far less mass than photons. They're energetic and small, so pass through most everything with almost no interaction. It's like the rice was just air to them. The marble comes through much faster.

Upon leaving the congestion of the sun's interior, light and neutrinos travel pretty close to the same speed - the speed of light in a vacuum.

Answer 3

The SuperKamiokande collaboration looked for neutrinos that were produced when cosmic rays bombarded oxygen or nitrogen nuclei in the atmosphere.
These "atmospheric neutrinos" are mostly muon neutrinos and interact very weakly with matter. Filled with 50 000 tonnes of water, however, the SuperKamiokande detector located deep in the Kamioka mine in Japan is so large that it can detect atmospheric neutrinos.
These neutrinos interact with atomic nuclei in the water to produce electrons, muons or tau leptons that travel faster than the speed of light in water to produce a shock wave of light called Cerenkov radiation. This radiation can be detected by sensitive photomultiplier tubes surrounding the water tank.

SuperKamiokande was also used to monitor solar neutrinos. The fusion reactions that take place in the Sun only produce electron neutrinos, but these can subsequently oscillate into both muon and tau neutrinos.
Though the experiment was able to detect the solar neutrinos, it was unable to distinguish between the different neutrino types.

In contrast, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Canada can identify the electron neutrinos because it is filled with "heavy water", which contains hydrogen nuclei with an extra neutron. Small numbers of electron neutrinos react with the heavy-hydrogen nuclei to produce fast electrons that create Cerenkov radiation

Since neutrinos travel at relativistic speeds, the effect of their mass is so tiny that it cannot be determined kinematically. Rather than search for neutrino mass directly, experiments such as SuperKamiokande and SNO have searched for effects that depend on the difference in mass between one type of neutrino and another.

In some respects these experiments are analogous to interferometers, which are sensitive to tiny differences in frequency between two interfering waves. Since a quantum particle can be thought of as a wave with a frequency given by its energy divided by Planck's constant, interferometry can detect tiny mass differences because the energy and frequency of the particles depend on their mass.

However, as to the 'why'?
The 'how' has been observed (to a point) but the why is, and will be for a long time, a mystery!

Answer 4

light reacts with matter more so it gets lost on its way out of the sun. meutrinoes barely react with anything so they get out faster. they also move close to the speed of light but not quite.

Answer 5

Thought travels faster actually

Answer 6

No one ever said that. What they said is, light is the fastest thing we know of!