Russian scientists will use one of the largest deep-water space telescopes to search for “Elvis particle physics.”
The Russian telescope, under construction since 2015, is designed to study black holes, distant galaxies and the remnants of exploding stars. It does this by searching the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia for so-called neutrinos. These are electrically charged subatomic particles, originating from distant cosmic places and radiating cosmic rays.
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The Russian telescope, under construction since 2015, is designed to study black holes, distant galaxies and the remnants of exploding stars. It does this by searching the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia for so-called neutrinos. These are elementary subatomic particles that are not electrically charged, originating from distant cosmic places and radiating cosmic rays. Scientists are eager to uncover the secrets of these particles in order to better map the universe and its history. But the field of neutrino astronomy is still in its infancy. So neutrinos are something special. They are the smallest particles known to scientists. They are so etheric that about 65 billion of them pass every second at the speed of light through a region the size of a human thumb without having any effect because they rarely interact with matter. So for neutrinos, the universe is actually a transparent world. They are also referred to as “Elvis particle physics”. Like Elvis by his fans, scientists around the world have observed the neutrino (previous experiments indicated the particle’s existence), but evidence for the ghost particle in reality is not yet available. They are not affected by interstellar magnetic fields, between galaxies, and other elements that disrupt the path of ordinary cosmic particles, such as protons and electrons. This is what makes neutrinos so valuable for tracking the earliest and most violent events in the universe. The Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) device scans ultrapure water at a depth of 1,300 meters for these neutrinos. But how can you see them when they have passed everything loose? When a neutrino collides with a water molecule, which is extremely rare, it produces a charged particle that produces a blue flash of light called the Cherenkov radiation. This effect was discovered by physicist Pavel A. Cherenkov. The direction of the blue light flashes reveals the exact direction the neutrinos came from. Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, due to its depth would be ideal to house this observatory. Russian scientists say their telescope is the largest neutrino detector in the Northern Hemisphere. The Baikal telescope faces the IceCube Neutrino, a giant neutrino observatory buried under the Antarctic ice at a US Antarctic Research Station, which made a breakthrough in 2013 by discovering 28 high-energy neutrinos from outside for the first time. . Also read: Scientists discover who is launching cosmic neutrinos at us
