Sterile neutrinos could also be a lot heavier than regular neutrinos, those kind of sterile neutrinos are ideal candidates for explaining dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry
Just as I am disappointed that "global warming" changed into the more ambiguous "climate change", I'm a little disappointed that the "right-handed neutrino" has turned into the "sterile neutrino". It's really strange that we only observe left handed neutrinos and either the revelation that there is a hidden right-handed neutrino or that neutrinos are fully Majorana particles without a right-handed form would be absolutely groundbreaking.
My take on it is that the neutrino mass term is not "physics beyond the standard model" but rather a "missing part of the standard model" and that one way or another, neutrinos hold an important secret, if not the important secret of the universe. (Note potentially three generations of right-handed neutrinos could exist at three mass scales and explain the gallium anomaly, cold dark matter, and the rarity of antimatter)
As a climatologist, I can tell you that we switched to “climate change” because it’s more precise. “Global” in global warming is not the “universal” sense of global, because not everywhere on Earth warms equally, and some places may even cool with mean global warming. Global climate change implies that the averages and ranges are changing. The phenomenon is best measured in statistics.
(Also as a climatologist I have no idea what the handedness of neutrinos even means. Something with spin?)
Its not quite that, the thing you're describing is called helicity. Helicity and chirality are closely related, they're the same if your particle is massless for example, but for massive particles they aren't the same.
Imagine I have a particle which is spinning in the same direction as its linear momentum (so positive helicity) but then I speed myself up really fast so now I'm going faster than it. Its linear momentum (to me) appears to have switched sign but its spin hasn't so the helicity has flipped.
Chirality is a more complicated thing which avoids this "problem" with helicity. Chirality doesn't change when the observer changed velocity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6912
Just as I am disappointed that "global warming" changed into the more ambiguous "climate change", I'm a little disappointed that the "right-handed neutrino" has turned into the "sterile neutrino". It's really strange that we only observe left handed neutrinos and either the revelation that there is a hidden right-handed neutrino or that neutrinos are fully Majorana particles without a right-handed form would be absolutely groundbreaking.
My take on it is that the neutrino mass term is not "physics beyond the standard model" but rather a "missing part of the standard model" and that one way or another, neutrinos hold an important secret, if not the important secret of the universe. (Note potentially three generations of right-handed neutrinos could exist at three mass scales and explain the gallium anomaly, cold dark matter, and the rarity of antimatter)