Nobel prize for physics 2015: how neutrinos saved the world

The prize goes to a discovery about the properties of neutrino particles that has saved us from worrying that Earth might end in an icy death

Astronomers called it the solar neutrino problem. It was much more than a problem. Upon its discovery in the late 1960s, it meant that the sun could be dying. And if the sun died, so would life on Earth. But thankfully the latest winners of the Nobel prize for physics, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B McDonald, have been addressing such concerns to great success.

The sun was theorised to be powered by nuclear reactions in its core and these produced neutrino particles. Theoretical models of the sun's interior had predicted the number of neutrinos that were being produced and by the mid-1960s, two American physicists had taken up the challenge of trying to detect them: Raymond Davis Jr, and John Bahcall.