On Saturday, a team of Russian researchers dropped a brand new telescope into icy Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth. It was not an accident; the instrument took the plunge to give scientists a better chance of detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that are extremely difficult to spot because they usually pass through matter without leaving a trace.
It may seem counterintuitive to try to get a better view of space from nearly a mile underwater. But if you look for neutrinos coming from space instead of light, this location makes many more senI knowNeutrinos cut through most common matter such as butter: B.y the time you reach the end of this sentence, you will have hundreds of trillions of neutrinos shot through your body. W.when passing certain media, such as water, the particles can sometimes leave proof of their existence.
Lake Baikal contains more water than all of the Great Lakes put together, making it a great place to observe those pesky little particles. So the Russians – in collaboration with Czech, German, Polish and Slovak researchers – splashed the neutrino sensor into the lake, about 2 miles offshore. (In Irkutsk, the lake is frozen and it is a destination for all kinds, from particle physicists to Instagram influencers).
The Russian telescope is not the first to look for neutrinos in alien territory; the United States has a detector with the nickname Ice Cube that is formed by one cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. This one also has a demonstrably 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 circuits visible through the clear glass sphere, and is set to detect neutrinos about a third of a mile away in any direction, or about as far as Toronto’s CN Tower high is. Ultimately Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research 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 Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. “Fresh water is also important, including the clarity of the water. And the fact that there is ice for two, two and a half months is also very important. “
Scientists want to detect neutrinos for a variety of reasons. First, learning more about neutrino behavior could help us understand it why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.