CAN you see ghosts?
The human eye is a miracle of biology. It allows us to see all kinds of things, though some things are admittedly harder to spot than others.
That said, can your eyeballs detect 'ghost particles'?
VERDICT:
TRUE
Neutrinos are one of nature's smallest particles detected by mankind.
If a neutrino was the size of a grain of salt, then an atom's size would span the distance from the Sun to the Earth, according to Dr Peggy Norris, a nuclear physicist and educator with the Sanford Lab Education and Outreach in 2020.
These elusive sub-atomic particles have almost no mass or charge, which allows them to pass through pretty much anything without interacting with it, because the atoms that make up any matter in the universe are 99.999% empty space.
Simply put, getting any atom to bump into a neutrino is like trying to catch a grain of sand with a sieve that has holes the size of buildings.
That's why neutrinos are also called the ghost particle, because they can go through anything like a ghost through a wall.
Luckily, there are a lot of neutrinos out there.
In fact, our Sun produces so many of them that about 70 billion neutrinos are going right through every centimetre of your body every second without so much as saying "excuse me".
So even though it is very difficult to detect a neutrino, it is not impossible.
To detect these elusive little fellas, scientists use building sized detectors like Japan's Super-Kamiokande detector (Super-K), a large cylinder of 41.4m-tall and 39.3m-diametre, containing 50,000 tons of water that is located 1km underground.
Every once in a while, a neutrino - out of trillions that pass through the Super-K - would collide with a water atom and create a very faint and quick flash.
The Super-K has over 11,000 photo detectors or "eyes" waiting to catch that flash.
And yet, despite its size and hypersensitivity, the Super-K on average only detects about 30 neutrinos per day.
Based on the same principle, a neutrino could hit an atom in your eyeball, causing it to emit the briefest and tiniest of flashes, which your retina could theoretically detect.
However, the chances of it happening - and of you even noticing it - is astronomically unlikely, but not zero.
Still, those are better odds than you ever catching a glimpse of a ghost.
References
https://ifirse.icise.vn/
https://www.prospectmagazine.
https://guernseydonkey.com/
