TALK about misnomers. It seems the particles that Enrico Fermi dubbed neutrinos, meaning 鈥渓ittle neutral ones鈥�, might stretch across billions of light years.
The big bang produced huge numbers of 鈥渞elic鈥� neutrinos, which are quantum-mechanical superpositions of three different mass-energy states. In the early universe, all of these states would have moved at close to the speed of light. But according to calculations by George Fuller and Chad Kishimoto of the University of California, San Diego, as the universe expanded, the most massive of these states slowed down in the relic neutrinos, stretching them across the universe ().
This raises the possibility that only one of the neutrino鈥檚 states could fall into a black hole. It鈥檚 unclear what would happen to the others if this occurred, says Fuller.
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