I thought Joachim Kopp's article at https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/122 was an even better explanation in some ways. It was buried as a link in the middle of the medium.com article.
I wonder if solar neutrino detection could be done on a satellite heading towards the sun. Seems like the signals may vary over distance from the sun (guessing here) perhaps providing some insight.
The problem with that at present is our only way to detect neutrinos is by using loads of mass, usually ice, water, or xenon. It’s going to be tough to launch a glacier or a vast tank of xenon to make up the body of a detector. We’d need some novel form of detection that isn’t dependent on the occasional reaction of a neutrino as it passes theough a huge body of something. Sadly, that isn’t on the horizon and would ironically require a better understanding of neutrino interactions before it could be done, if it could be done.
Even worse, most neutrino detectors rely on being under thick masses of rock to filter out things like cosmic rays, which would otherwise completely flood the detectors.
The ice would need to be very clear, surrounded by a grid of detectors, and all of that surrounded by a minimum of several hundreds of metres of rock on all sides.
The reason it needs to be clear is the detector watches for flashes of Cherenkov radiation.
That would actually be the least of your worries. Ice is actually a pretty good insulator because it doesn't convect. Comets are giant snowballs. They regularly venture close to the sun and only lose a small percentage of their mass.
How flooded are we talking? A detector in orbit would regularly have an earth sized mass of rock between it and the sun so the difference could be teased out statistically for low values of flooded.
Don't we use water/xenon for it's combination of density and transparency? I wonder if there are other things we could use to shrink detectors at the expense of missing many wavelengths produced by collisions?
A large detector also has the advantage of being a large target. Even if you managed to make a detector a thousand times smaller while keeping it just as sensitive as our current ones, you'd still detect a thousand times fewer neutrinos.
Radiation flux varies as the square of the distance so a 3% change in distance produces a 6% change in flux. That seems to me like it should be detectable (but IANAP).
Even on my laptop, I'm no longer able to browse without a bookmarklet handy to remove sticky position elements. Vertical space is at enough of a premium just from the prevalence of widescreen aspect ratios; we don't need so many inch-tall menu bars and overlays getting in the way of the real content.
I set this flag in Chrome so I always get the "Show Simplified View" prompt. It can sometimes get in the way, but it's generally nice to have. Wish it was simply a menu option.
