Neutrinos are vanishingly small particles, but a theoretical analysis of neutrinos left over from the Big Bang shows that they could stretch across billions of light years.
Like all fundamental particles, the state and position of neutrinos can be described with a quantum-mechanical 'wavefunction'. George Fuller and Chad Kishimoto of the University of California, San Diego, looked at the wavefunctions of neutrinos left over from the very beginning of the Universe. They found that these waves could extend for billions of light years. If true, that would mean that the individual neutrinos are effectively spread out over the same cosmic distances.
Disturbances could cause the wavefunction to collapse, and Fuller and Kishimoto postulate that gravitational effects or space-time itself might make the little particles pop into a single location.
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Quantum physics: Attack of the giant neutrinos. Nature 459, 619 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/459619d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/459619d
