A new neutrino detector will appear deep below the ocean surface. Chinese engineers will equip it with thousands
Every second there are tens of trillions of neutrinossweep through the Earth and our bodies, without interacting with anything. Sometimes these neutrally charged particles collide with a wandering atomic nucleus, emitting an almost imperceptible spark of light.
It helps scientists not only learnabout the presence of a neutrino, but also to determine where it came from. Physicists are especially interested in those that arrived from outside the solar system. These high-energy particles are born in black holes, supernovae, and pulsars. It is precisely these high-energy neutrinos that scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are trying to find.
The new detector will consist of 55,000 sensors,suspended at a depth of 1 km below the ocean surface, the project's lead researcher Chen Mingjun told Xinhua. The sun's rays cannot travel as deep, which will help sensors detect high-energy neutrinos and distinguish them from solar neutrinos.
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Cover image courtesy of NASA, ESA and M. Kornmesser