Author Topic: Is this the world’s weirdest telescope?  (Read 478 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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Is this the world’s weirdest telescope?
« on: January 29, 2022, 03:30:19 am »
Cosmos by Lauren Fuge 28 January 2022

Three undersea neutrino detector observatories are in the works. What seems like a very difficult and risky project comes with great galactic rewards.

raditionally, astronomy has used light to study distant celestial objects. But photons are not the only particles that reach us. Neutrinos are also powerful tools for studying the universe, especially at its extremes, because they don’t get deflected or hindered.

They’re tiny, nearly massless, and absolutely everywhere – they’re constantly being created by the Sun’s nuclear fusion processes, for example. If you hold up your hand, about 60 billion neutrinos will pass through your thumbnail every second, like miniscule ghosts.

But these are not the most interesting kinds of neutrinos, according to astrophysicists. Instead, they want to study super-fast, super-energetic neutrinos that have come from far, far away. And these turn out to be incredibly difficult to spot.

That’s why scientists want to build a neutrino telescope more than two kilometres beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

She says that a prototype of the telescope – called the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment, or P-ONE – will be built by end of next year.

So here’s the plan: Just off the coast of British Columbia in the north-east Pacific Ocean, seventy one-kilometre-long strings will be sunk deep into the darkness. The strings – each studded with sensitive light detectors – will be attached to floats so they stand upright like kelp.

Then, they’ll wait and watch for flashes of radiation that occur when the nearly massless subatomic particles interact in the water.

Specifically, the telescope will look for high-energy neutrinos that have come from far across the universe, produced in exotic events like supernovae, gamma ray bursts or colliding stars.

The only telescope currently sensitive enough to detect these high-energy neutrinos is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. It’s been operating in Antarctica since 2011, with detectors drilled into a cubic kilometre of pure ice.

“Neutrino astronomy is still in its infancy,” explains James, who works at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy in WA. “The more groups trying to detect these elusive particles, the more new ideas, better engineering solutions, and raw statistical power we will have for understanding them.”

More: https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/pacific-ocean-neutrino-telescope/