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I was super excited when I started reading this article, I thought they were talking about a direct measurement of the CNB.

Right now, the CMB is as far back as we can see in time. That radiation originates from a time when the Universe was around 380,000 years old. The CNB originates from when the Universe was two seconds old. A direct measurement of it would be an astounding achievement and would give us many new insights into how the Universe formed.

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Yeah, such a measurement is extraordinarily unlikely. Neutrinos are extremely hard to detect, but the thing is there are different temperatures of neutrinos, and their detectability scales extremely non-linearly with temperature. Even with extremely high energy/temperature neutrinos from supernovae or stellar fusion we still only detect the faintest fraction of the vast quantity that flows through the detectors. The CNB is at a temperature of only a few Kelvin, and is made of extremely low energy neutrinos that are effectively impossible for us to detect, let alone study with current technology.

It is something being worked on, though [0]. Extremely difficult does not equate to impossible :)

0: http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03966

That's why I said "effectively" impossible. There are so many orders of magnitude between what we can detect and what would be needed to study the CNB. It's hard to have hope that we'll ever be able to overcome that, though it'd be awesome if we could.

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