The researchers say this work represents the first direct observation of collider neutrinos and will help us to understand how these particles form, what their properties are, and their role in the evolution of the Universe.

The results, achieved using the FASERnu detector at the Large Hadron Collider, were presented at the 57th Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories conference in Italy.

And while we may not notice them on a day-to-day basis, physicists believe that their mass – however slight – probably affects the Universe's gravity (although neutrinos have pretty much been ruled out as dark matter).

Although their interaction with matter is small, it's not completely nonexistent; now and again, a cosmic neutrino collides with another particle, producing a very faint burst of light.

That means that the likelihood that the signals were produced by random chance is so low as to be almost nothing; a significance level of 5 sigma is sufficient to qualify as a discovery in particle physics.

Back in 2021, physicist David Casper of UC Irvine projected that the run would produce around 10,000 neutrino interactions, which means we've barely scratched the surface of what FASERnu has to offer.