Lifeboat Foundation

In early times, the universe was an energetic mix of strongly interacting particles. The first particles to break free from this dense soup were neutrinos, the lightest and most weakly interacting particles of the Standard Model of particle physics. These neutrinos are still around us today, but are very hard to detect directly because they are so weakly interacting. An international team of cosmologists, including Daniel Baumann and Benjamin Wallisch from the University of Amsterdam, have now succeeded in measuring the influence of this ‘cosmic neutrino background’ on the way galaxies have become clustered during the evolution of the universe. The research was published in Nature Physics this week.