Lifeboat Foundation

The humble neutrino, an elusive subatomic particle that passes effortlessly through normal matter, plays an outsized role among the particles that comprise our universe. To fully explain how our universe came to be, we need to know its mass. But, like so many of us, it avoids being weighed.

Now, an international team of researchers from the United States and Germany leading an ambitious quest called Project 8 reports that their distinctive strategy is a realistic contender to be the first to measure the neutrino mass. Once fully scaled up, Project 8 could help reveal how neutrinos influenced the early evolution of the universe as we know it.

In 2022, the KATRIN research team set an upper bound for how heavy the neutrino could possibly be. That milestone was a tour-de-force accomplishment that has been decades in the making. But these results simply narrow the search window. KATRIN will soon reach and may one day even exceed its targeted detection limits, but the featherweight neutrino might be lighter still, begging the question: “What’s next?”