Blank about Mont Blanc.

Bank about Mont Blanc

One of the mysteries about supernova 1987A is what to think of the Mont Blanc neutrinos. On the night the supernova exploded, a neutrino detector called LSD, located under Mont Blanc on the French-Swiss border, recorded bursts of neutrinos that its operators think came from the supernova.

P. Galeotti of the University of Turin, Italy, was at the meeting to argue for consideration of LSD's observation. However, most observers of SN1987A consider that the bursts of neutrinos recorded about four hours later by the IMB detector in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, and the Kamiokande detector in Kamioka, Japan, are the neutrinos that astrophysicists would expect a supernova to produce at the moment of its explosion. As W. David Arnett of the University of Chicago pointed out, they can extrapolate the supernova's light curve, its graph of brightness over time, back to an appropriate starting point at the moment IMB and Kamiokande recorded their neutrinos, so they feel that was the moment the explosion began. Reportedly a Soviet experiment at Baksan in the Caucasus Mountains also detected neutrinos at about the same time as IMB and Kamiokande, but no one from Baksan was at the meeting of confirm this.

No one faulted LSD's experimental technique, but nobody seems to be able to do much with Mont Blanc's early neutrinos. However, Galeotti was not about to let them fade away. Guido Pizzella of the University of Rome, who is not involved in the neutrino experiments, said he sensed in his colleagues "an Aristotelian attitude not to consider experimental evidence one does not like.' Instead, he proposed that each group write papers and then the scientific community can decide which is good.

Others were less harsh on themselves. "I can't explain it,' said Adam Burrows of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It may take a lot of time to find out what happened,' said Arnett.

Stirling Colgate of the Los Alamos (N.M) National Laboratory suggested the possibility of some kind of binary system being involved with the supernova, but he pointed out that many observational findings in science at large stand unexplained for long times: "You may need 10 years.'