From Nanowerk News:

Only three or four supernovas happen in our galaxy every century. These are super-energetic events that release neutrinos at the speed of light.

At the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, a new computer system has been installed in order to monitor in real time and inform the scientific community of the arrival of these mysterious particles, which can offer crucial information on the collapse of stars and the formation of black holes.A kilometre underground, in the depths of a Japanese mine, scientists have built a tank of ultra-pure water inside a gigantic cylinder full of photomultiplier tubes. This is the Super-Kamiokande experiment, one of the major objectives of which is the detection of neutrinos -particles with near-zero mass- that come from nearby supernovas.

The problem is that these stellar explosions occur very infrequently: only three or four each century in our galaxy.

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Image Credit:    Institute for Cosmic Ray Research

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