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It is because neutrinos could escape so readily that a critical role was attributed them for bringing about the star's sudden death and the ensuing explosion. Neutrinos are formed in a variety of ways, many as neutrino-antineutrino pairs from highly energetic gamma rays and others arise as the compressed protons capture an electron (or expel a positron) to become neutrons, a reaction that is accompanied by the release of a neutrino. Something in the order of 1057 electron neutrinos are thought to be released in a supernova-type collapse. Neutral current reactions from Zo particles of the weak force also contribute electron neutrinos along with the 'heavy' muon and tau neutrinos.
Together, these neutrinos would constitute a "vast quantity of tiny particles devoid of electric potential" that readily escape from the star's interior. Calculations indicated that they would carry ninety-nine percent of the energy released in the final supernova explosion. The gigantic flash of light accompanying the explosion accounts for only part of the remaining one percent!
References
Hoyle, F., and J. Narlikar. The Physics Astronomy Frontier. (W.H. Freeman & Co. San Francisco, 1980.)
Sutton, C. Spaceship Neutrino. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992)
Renewal of the Search for the Neutron Star
Hypotheses on the possible origins of the Urantia Paper's statement on star collapse:
In the early 1930's, the idea that supernova explosions could occur and result in the formation of neutron stars was extensively publicized by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology (Caltec) who worked in Professor Millikan's Dept. For a period during the mid-thirties, Zwicky was also at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sadler is said to have known Millikan. So alternative possibilities for the origin of The Urantia Book quote above could be:
1. The revelators followed their mandate and used a human source of information about supernovae, possibly Zwicky.
2. Dr Sadler had learned about the tiny particles devoid of electric potential from either Zwicky, Millikan, or some other knowledgeable person and incorporated it into The Urantia Book.
3. It is information supplied to fill missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge as permitted in the mandate. (1110)
Zwicky had the reputation of being a brilliant scientist but given to much wild speculation, some of which turned out to be correct. A paper published by Zwicky and Baade in 1934 proposed that neutron stars would be formed in stellar collapse and that 10% of the mass would be lost in the process (Phys. Reviews. Vol. 45)
In "Black Holes and Time Warps. Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" (Picador, London, 1994), a book that covers the work and thought of this period in detail, K. S . Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltec, writes: In the early 1930's, Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade joined forces to study novae, stars that suddenly flare up and shine 10,000 times more brightly than before. Baade was aware of tentative evidence that, besides ordinary novae, there existed superluminous novae. These were roughly of the same brightness but since they were thought to occur in nebulae far out beyond our Milky Way, they must signal events of extraordinary magnitude. Baade collected data on six such novae that had occurred during the current century.
As Baade and Zwicky struggled to understand supernovae, James Chadwick, in 1932, reported the discovery of the neutron. This was just what Zwicky required to calculate that if a star could be made to implode until it reached the density of the atomic nucleus, it might transform into a gas of neutrons, reduce its radius to a shrunken core, and, in the process, lose about 10 % of its mass. The energy equivalent of the mass loss would then supply the explosive force to power a supernova.
Zwicky believed cosmic rays accounted for the supernova mass-energy loss
Information, extracted from Thorne's book6, indicates that Zwicky knew nothing about the possible role of "little neutral particles" in the implosion of a neutron star, but rather that he attributed the entire mass-energy loss to cosmic rays. So, if not from Zwicky, what then is the human origin of The Urantia Book's statement that the neutrinos escaping from its interior bring about the collapse of the imploding star? (Current estimates attribute about 99% of the energy of a supernova explosion to being carried off by the neutrinos).
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