With the announcement, on 11 February 2016, of the first detection ever of a gravitational wave by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations, a New Astronomy, based on listening to the space-time vibrations, was born.
This long-awaited wave, 100 years after the theoretical prediction by Albert Einstein and 50 years after the first experimental efforts, arrived on Earth on 14 September 2015 and was finally perceived by humans with very smart “microphones”.
The observation of a second neutrino tau interaction at the Gran Sasso Laboratory was announced by the OPERA Collaboration during the 25th Neutrino Conference, in Kyoto, earlier this month. This result follows on from the first observation, made in 2010.
With this new result the OPERA detector is back on track to its original motivations, after a noisy excursion over the measurement of the neutrino time of flight. The OPERA experiment was designed to search for the rare…