The neutrino, a product of certain nuclear decay reactions, is maddeningly hard to detect, even from the nearby Sun. In the early 1950s, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, Raymond Davis developed a system for capturing the radioactive argon atoms produced when neutrinos collide with molecules containing chlorine and carbon. He filled a tank in the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota with over 600 tons of the dry-cleaning fluid perchloroethylene (C2Cl4), bubbling helium through it to remove the argon produced by neutrinos. The amount of argon then gave a measure of the number of neutrinos that hit the tank.