On Saturday, a team of Russian researchers dropped a brand new telescope into the sparse Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on earth. It was not an accident; the instrument gave the scientists a better chance of detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that are extremely difficult to spot, as they usually move through matter without leaving a trace.
It may seem counter-intuitive to try to get a better overview of the space from a kilometer underwater. But if you’re looking for neutrinos coming from space instead of light, this location makes much more sensesay. Neutrinos cut through ordinary girls like butter: By when you get to the end of this sentence there will be hundreds of trillions of neutrinos shot through your body. Wif he goes through some media, like water, the particles can sometimes leave evidence of their existence.
Lake Baikal contains more water than all the Great Lakes combined, making it the best place to observe those pesky particles. So the Russians – in collaboration with Czech, German, Polish and Slovak researchers – splashed the neutrino sensor into the lake, about 3 km from the shore. (In Irkutsk, the lake is frozen and is a destination for all kinds, from particle physicists to Instagram influencers).
The Russian telescope is not the first to look for neutrinos in foreign lands; the United States has a detector nicknamed Ice cube which consists of a cubic kilometer of ice on the South Pole. This one also has a probably less catchy name: the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector, or Baikal GVD for short.
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The telescope looks like a technological crystal ball, with its circuit visible through the clear glass sphere, to detect neutrinos, about a third of a mile in any direction, or as far as the CN Tower of Toronto is high. Finally, Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research said AFP, the distance would be doubled.
“Lake Baikal is obviously the only lake where you can use a neutrino telescope because of its depth,” Bair Shoibonov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. ‘Fresh water is also important, and so is clarity about 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 many reasons. Knowing more about neutrino behavior can help us understand it why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.