The Sun effects Radioactive decay rates?

[JohnB]

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html

 

Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.

 

On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.

 

How utterly fascinating.

 

I think that finding the 33 day recurring pattern was possibly the oddest part of the whole thing. But how would Neutrinos change the rate anyway?

 

"It doesn't make sense according to conventional ideas," Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed."

Edited August 24, 2010 by JohnB

[Mr Skeptic]

It's not really all that surprising. We change decay rates of things all the time, by well-understood methods. Nuclear decay is hard to change because the nucleus is rather inaccessible. Silicon-32 decays by beta decay into Phosphorous-32, producing electron anti-neutrinos and electrons. If you were to provide the process with electron neutrinos, this should lower the energy barrier to decay. Although it is not entirely clear from the article what effect they're saying the neutrinos have, it would pretty much have to be speeding up of the decay.