A. Suzuki

A thermometer cooled to near absolute zero picks up the heat from a single particle. That's how cryogenic calorimeters work — instruments that catch ultra-rare events like neutrinoless double beta decay. But old thermistor thermometers respond slowly: in about a millisecond.

A dark matter detector is like a super-sensitive microphone listening for silence. It picks up tiny heat jolts, phonons, that occur when a particle grazes a crystal. But instead of silence, the instruments have been hearing noise for years: a slew of weak signals below a few hundred electronvolts.

When a massive star runs out of fuel, its core collapses, giving birth to a supernova and unleashing an all-penetrating shower of neutrinos.