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Burst Neutrinos from Nitrogen Flash

A. M. Serenelli, M. Fukugita

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0505333

Abstract

Neutrinos give a novel probe to explore deep interior of astrophysical objects, which otherwise is not accessible with optical observations; among notable examples are solar and supernova neutrinos. We show that there is a new class of strong neutrino emission from helium burning, N + alpha --> 18F gamma followed by beta decay 18F --> 18O + e+ + nue, that gives a maximum neutrino luminosity of 108 times the solar bolometric luminosity at the helium-core flash of a 1 Msun star, whereas the flash is not observable by optical means. This means that the neutrino flux, of average energy of 0.382 MeV, will be 10% the solar CNO neutrino flux on Earth if the star is located at 10pc.

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