![\"Experiment](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/experiment-shrinks-wei.jpg\" "\\"Installation")
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Installation of the inner electrode system of the KATRIN Main Spectrometer. Credit: Markus Breig, KIT<\/p>\n
Scientists trying to discover the elusive mass of neutrinos, tiny “ghost particles” that could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, announced a new limit on Thursday for how much they could weigh, halving the previous estimate.<\/p>\n
Since the existence of neutrinos<\/a> was proposed nearly a century ago, scientists around the world have struggled to learn much about them\u2014particularly their mass.<\/p>\n This is important because the neutrino, as the most abundant particle in the universe, “weaves a thread that connects the infinitely small and the infinitely large,” Thierry Lasserre, a physicist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.<\/p>\n Its mass “influences the structures that make up the cosmos,” he added.<\/p>\n These invisible particles have been washing across the universe since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.<\/p>\n The number of neutrinos out there is difficult to comprehend\u2014there are roughly a billion for every atom in the cosmos.<\/p>\n However, because they have so little mass and lack an electric charge<\/a>, neutrinos very rarely interact with matter.<\/p>\n For example, trillions of these so-called ghost particles are thought to be streaming through human bodies every second, with us none the wiser.<\/p>\n This makes them exceedingly difficult to study. But not impossible.<\/p>\n