Comment by joshvm
14 days ago
Unless I'm missing something - do the notes cover neutrino astronomy somewhere else? Aside from the general discussion on stellar evolution. Shame, because the detection of pre-optical neutrino emission from 1987A by Kamiokande (and others) was a fantastic theoretical confirmation. Essentially when the core collapses, the environment around the surroundings are optically opaque, but the neutrinos sail on through so you'd expect to see them before the photons.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987ApJ...318L..63B/abstra...
I would recommend Telescope in the Ice as one of the best introductions to modern neutrino detectors - why and where they're built. Also provides a good insight into how a big collaboration is formed, funded and operates. I've worked for IceCube so I'm somewhat biased, but the book is great just for the history.
IceCube has an entire processing pathway (on ice) that is specifically designed to trigger on a supernova detection. One of the very few science results that would page us, and why uptime is absolutely critical to the experiment. On the one hand, we can't point the detector and we don't know where the signal will come from, so it's not predictable (and it's highly transient). On the other, becuase the burst happens shortly before the optical, we can use neutrinos to trigger optical observations as fast as possible - pretty much the whole observing community will drop what they're doing if a star blows up.
I believe we'd expect the whole flux through the detector to bump up above the background, at least at IceCube. PDF: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/309/1/0...
These are my notes for a course in stellar physics that I am teaching, the full set of lecture notes is here https://www.as.arizona.edu/~mrenzo/courses/lectures.html and includes some more on neutrino cooling in evolved stars, core collapse physics, and a guest lecture (also with notes that I am NOT the author of) on high energy neutrinos, but if you want to learn specifically about neutrino astrophysics this is certainly not the most comprehensive resource.
Re neutrinos, I would also mention KM3NET which looks for Cherenkov flashes in the Mediterranean sea used as a detector, which recently detected some extremely high energy neutrinos, e.g.:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08543-1
> Essentially when the core collapses, the environment around the surroundings are optically opaque, but the neutrinos sail on through so you'd expect to see them before the photons.
Also, the source, the hot nascent neutron star, is optically thick to neutrinos, so it radiates them very fiercely. Almost all the energy of the collapse goes into neutrino radiation.