On Saturday, a team of Russian researchers dropped a brand new telescope on the cold Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth. It was not an accident; the instrument took the step to give scientists a better shot at detecting neutrinos, evasive subatomic particles that are extremely difficult to observe because they usually pass right through matter without leaving a trace.
It may seem counterintuitive to try to get a better picture of the space from almost a kilometer underwater. But if look for neutrinos coming from space instead of light, this location makes a lot more senseknow. Neutrinos slice through most common materials, such as butter: BBy the time you reach the end of this sentence, they will have hundreds of billions of neutrinos coup through your body. Wthe hen passing through some environments, such as water, however, particles can sometimes leave evidence of their existence.
Lake Baikal contains more water than all the Great Lakes put together, making it a prime place to observe those boring little particles. So the Russians – in collaboration with Czech, German, Polish and Slovak researchers – sprayed the neutrino sensor in the lake, about 3 kilometers from shore. (In Irkutsk, the lake is frozen and is a destination for all types, from particle physicists to Instagram influencers).
The Russian telescope is not the first to look for neutrinos on foreign soil; The United States has a nickname detector Ice Cube which consists of one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. It also certainly has a less captivating name: the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector or Baikal-GVD for short.
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Looking like a technological crystal ball, with its circuits visible through the transparent glass sphere, the telescope is configured to detect neutrinos about a third of a mile away in any direction, or up to the height of Toronto’s CN Tower. Finally, Dmitry Naumov from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research he told AFP, that distance would be doubled.
“Of course, Lake Baikal is the only lake where you can deploy a neutrino telescope because of its depth,” Bair Shoibonov of the Joint Nuclear Research Institute told AFP. “Fresh water is also important, and the clarity of the water. And the fact that there is ice cover for two, two and a half months is also very important. ”
Scientists want to detect neutrinos for several reasons. First, learning more about the behavior of neutrinos could help us understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.