 In the early 1950s , working in <unk> and Savannah River Sites , Reines and Cowan developed the equipment and procedures with which they first detected the supposedly undetectable neutrinos in June 1956 . Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino 's properties and interactions , which work would influence study of the neutrino for many researchers to come . This included the detection of neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays , and the 1987 detection of neutrinos emitted from Supernova <unk> , which inaugurated the field of neutrino astronomy . 
