Thousands of meters underground, in the chthonic depths of Earth's crust, scientists have at long last caught solar neutrinos in the act of transforming carbon-13 into nitrogen-13.

It's the first time this rare neutrino-mediated nuclear reaction has ever been seen, revealing how some of the most elusive and intangible particles in the Universe can nevertheless quietly reshape matter, down in the subterranean dark far from the surface.

"This discovery uses the natural abundance of carbon-13 within the experiment's liquid scintillator to measure a specific, rare interaction," says physicist Christine Kraus of SNOLAB , the neutrino observatory in Canada where the detection was made.

"To our knowledge, these results represent the lowest energy observation of neutrino interactions on

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