AT a stroke, a cosmologist in the US may have at solved two of the most perplexing conundrums in astrophysics, together with another, smaller problem.
Scientists have long been puzzled why the Sun seems to emit fewer neutrinos than their theories predict. The puzzle disappears if neutrinos have a small mass, but unfortunately there has been no good reason to reject the conventional idea that neutrinos are massless.
Now Anupam Singh of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has devised a plausible theory to explain how neutrinos could have acquired mass. Furthermore, if cosmologists' equations are altered in line with his theory, the Universe would no longer seem to be younger than some of its stars. To cap his achievement, Singh's calculations also explain for the first time why most quasars - distant but powerful sources of radiation which are probably driven by black holes - formed around 2.3 billion years ...
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