Comment by shadowgovt

One of my favorite bits of astrophysics trivia is that the neutrino detection experiments serve as an early-warning system for supernovae, to allow astronomers to prioritize telescope time and swing the scopes around to see the first visible-light and radio signals of the event.

This is because the electromagnetic energy of the supernova can take hours to force its way through all the star's mass to the surface when the core dies, but the gravitational crush turning protons and electrons into neutrons releases a massive burst of neutrinos in every direction. And the neutrinos are so weakly-interacting with the matter in the star that they get out first. Then, a million years later, arrive in our solar system at such a high fraction of lightspeed that they presage the coming electromagnetic shock-front because the constant difference in escape time between neturinos, which are particles of matter, getting out of the star without interacting with anything and the electromagnetic waves moving through the star's matter at a fraction of lightspeed created a gap that the light never caught up to.

The universe is a profoundly wild place.