Neutrinos exist in three “flavors:” muon, electron and tau. According to a press release from William and Mary, the experiment revealed the first neutrino oscillations ever witnessed. This proved that the missing muon neutrinos had turned into electron neutrinos.

Neutrinos are neutral subatomic particles unaffected by most atomic forces and with only a smidgen of mass. They’re produced by a variety of high-energy reactions, including the Big Bang, solar fusion, supernovas and nuclear reactions. “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning, and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying”.

“People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations”, said NOvA co-spokesperson Peter Shanahan of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in a Fermilab release. She also says that the physicists involved had determined that if no such muon neutrinos were, in fact, oscillating between the beam source and the Ash River, the more distant detector would then attract just one background oscillation event from within the beam. The first results from the NOvA neutrino experiment were unveiled this Friday, and the findings could change our fundamental understanding of how the universe works for good.

Researchers were able to observe the oscillation by firing a trillions of of muon neutrinos from an accelerator at the Fermilab, outside Chicago. Fermilab makes the neutrino beam, calculates its composition at origin & then fires it through the Earth for more than five-hundred miles.

Since February 2014, researchers have been collecting data by recording neutrino interactions in the 50-feet tall, 50-feet wide and 200-feet long, 14,000-ton far detector in Ash River, Minnesota.

Since neutrinos oscillate, they can change from one type into another. The results show that the experiment is emitting and detecting neutrinos, as designed.

NoVA will now be gathering data over the next six years even as researchers exercise to figure out the properties of these properties which so far are vaguely understood. Most of the beam coming from Fermilab is made up of muon neutrinos.

The NOvA experiments are trying to explain why neutrinos oscillate between these three states by sending them through a 500-mile underground tunnel. Matter and antimatter could have just annihilated and we’d be left with nothing in the universe but energy. The beam travels for over 500 miles straight through the Earth oscillating (changing type) along the way.

A graphic representation of one of the first neutrino interactions captured at the NOvA far detector in northern Minnesota.