system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could someone explain what Neutrinos are exactly?

What are Neutrinos in the simplest of terms and how will further research of them be beneficial to the world?
Thanks!


EDIT: thanks for all the great responses!
gpt
Neutrinos are fundamental particles like electrons. They have no electric charge, so they do not interact with normal matter as readily as other particles do. This is why you often see people referring to neutrinos passing through solid matter easily. 

Neutrinos do interact though, mainly through the weak interaction which is why they still rarely interact with normal matter. 

The immediate importance of neutrinos is most obvious in the case of nuclear reactions. These reactions release less energy than we expected, and we discovered the missing energy went into neutrino production. 

Our standard model also predicts neutrinos to be massless, but due to something called neutrino flavor oscillations, we know that it can't be true. So to formulate a proper theory of everything, we need something that corrects that error. 

Learning something by studying neutrinos might not affect the world directly, but this knowledge of the interactions neutrinos participate in might help us understand these interactions better when applied in other cases.