After four decades of setbacks, the neutrino observation telescope under the frozen Lake Baikal in Russia is about to make scientific results.
Lake Baikal, Russia—A glass ball, the size of a beach ball, is drilled into an ice hole and then dropped to the deepest lake bottom in the world with a metal cable.
Then another one, another one.
These light detection spheres are suspended in a depth of 4,000 feet below the ground in pitch black. The cables carrying them can hold 36 such balls, separated by 50 feet. There are 64 such cables, anchored by anchors and buoys, two miles from the jagged southern shore of the Siberia lake, with the bottom of which is more than a mile down.
This is the largest telescope in the northern hemisphere, designed to explore black holes, distant galaxies and the exploded star wreckage. It is achieved by searching for neutrinos, cosmic particles, which are so small that trillions of neutrons pass through each of us every second. Scientists believe that if only we can learn to read the information they convey, we can chart the universe and its history in ways that we do not yet fully understand.
80-year-old Russian physicist Grigory V. Domogatsky said: "You will never miss the opportunity to ask any questions to the natural world," he is committed to building this kind of underwater telescope It has a history of 40 years.
A moment later, he added: "You never know what the answer will be."
It is still under construction, but Dr. Domogatski and other scientists have dreamed of longer telescopes than ever before. Close to achieving the goal of the result. Leaping over the age of geopolitics and astrophysics, looking for neutrinos from far away in the universe reveals how Russia managed to retain some of the Soviet Union’s unique scientific capabilities and the limitations of this legacy.
The Baikal adventure is not the only effort to find neutrinos in the most remote places in the world.Dozens of instruments search for particles in specialized laboratories across the planet. However, the new Russian project will be an important complement to IceCube’s work. IceCube is the world’s largest neutrino telescope. This is a US-led, US$279 million project that covers about a quarter cubic mile of ice in Antarctica. .
Russian physicist Grigory V led the 40-year exploration of the establishment of the observatory.
The telescope is located two miles on the southern coast of Lake Baikal in Siberia. The bottom of the lake is more than a mile down, making it the deepest lake in the world.
Scientist Yevgeny Pliskovsky monitors the data of a building on the shore of Lake Baikal.
IceCube uses a grid of light detectors similar to the Baikal Telescope and discovered a neutrino in 2017. Scientists say it is almost certain that it came from a supermassive black hole. This is the first time scientists have identified the source of rain from high-energy particles in space from cosmic rays. This is a breakthrough in neutrino astronomy, and this branch is still in its infancy.
Practitioners in this field believe that when they learn to use neutrinos to read the universe, they may make new and unexpected discoveries-just as the lens makers who developed the first telescope could not imagine, Galileo later Will use it to discover the moons of Jupiter.
University of Wisconsin-Madison astrophysicist and IceCube director Francis L. Halzen said in a telephone interview: “It’s like looking at the sky at night.See a star. "For spooky particles.
Early work by Soviet scientists helped inspired Dr. Halzen to build a neutrino detector in Antarctic ice in the 1980s. Now, Dr. Harzen says his team believes It may have discovered two other sources of neutrinos from deep in space-but it is difficult to determine because no one else has discovered them. He hopes that with the development of the Baikal Telescope, this situation will change in the next few years
Dr. Harzen said: "We must be super conservative, because no one can check what we are doing right now. "What excites me is that there is another experiment to interact with and exchange data.
In the 1970s, despite the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviet Union were still working together to plan to build the first deep-water trino detector off the coast of Hawaii. However, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was The project was driven out. Therefore, in 1980, the Moscow Nuclear Research Institute, led by Dr. Domogatski, began its own neutrino telescope research work. It seems obvious where to try, even though it is located About 2500 miles away: Lake Baikal.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the project did not exceed the scope of planning and design, which put many scientists in the country into poverty and put their efforts into chaos. However, Berlin A research institute on the outskirts of the country (which later became part of the DESY particle research center in Germany) joined the Baikal research.
Christian Spiering, who led the German team, recalled transporting hundreds of pounds Butter, sugar, coffee and sausages to sustain the annual winter expedition on Lake Baikal. He also brought thousands of dollars in cash to Moscow to supplement the meager salary of the Russians.
Dr. Domogatski And his team persevered. Dr. Spiering recalled,When an electronics manufacturer in Lithuania refused to accept payments in rubles, a physicist negotiated to pay for a train full of cedar wood.
In a conversation with Dr. Spiering, Dr. Domogatski once compared his scientist with the frog in the frog. This proverb fell into a vat of milk and there is only one way to survive : "It must keep moving until the milk turns into butter."
The rising sun over Lake Baikal. In winter, three feet of ice covers the lake, making it an ideal platform for installing underwater photomultiplier tube arrays.
By the mid-1990s, the Russian team had managed to identify "atmospheric" neutrinos-but not from collisions in the Earth’s atmosphere. Neutrinos in outer space. For this reason, larger detectors will be needed. When Russia began to reinvest in science under the leadership of President Vladimir V. Putin in the 2000s, Dr. Domogatski received more than US$30 million. Funds were used to build a new Baikal telescope as big as IceCube.
The lake is one mile deep and has the clearest fresh water in the world. Tsarist railways can easily bypass the southern coast. Most importantly, it is covered by three feet of ice in winter: this is an ideal platform for installing underwater photomultiplier tube arrays in nature.
is as if Baikal is engaged in this type of research," said Bair Shaybonov, a researcher on the project.
construction began in 2015.The first stage consists of 2,304 light-detecting spheres suspended in the depths and is scheduled to be completed in April when the ice melts. (The sphere is suspended in the water all year, monitoring neutrinos, and sending data to scientists’ lakeshore bases via underwater cables.) The telescope has been collecting data for many years, but the Russian Minister of Science Valery Falkov ( Valery N. Falkov) plummeted. As part of the opening ceremony of this month's TV production, a chain plunged into the ice.
The Baikal telescope looks down from the entire earth, towards the other side, towards the center of the Milky Way, which actually uses the earth as a huge sieve. In most cases, larger particles that hit the other side of the planet will eventually collide with atoms. However, almost all neutrinos (100 billion neutrinos pass through your fingertips every second) are basically continuous in a straight line.
However, when a very small number of neutrinos hit an atomic nucleus in the water, it produces a cone of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. This effect was discovered by the Soviet physicist Pavel A. Cherenkov, one of the former colleagues of Dr. Domogatski, located in the lobby of the Moscow Institute.
Many physicists believe that if you spend decades monitoring the tiny flashes of Chilenkov light in a billion tons of deep water, you will eventually find neutrinos, whose origins can be traced back to cosmic fires. These fires will They launched billions of light years.
The direction of the blue cones even reveals the precise direction from which the neutrinos that caused them came. Because there is no electric charge, neutrinos will not be affected by interstellar and interstellar magnetic fields, nor will they disturb the paths of other types of cosmic particles (such as protons and electrons). The neutrino travels through the universe within the range allowed by the gravitational force of Einstein .
This is why neutrinos are so important for studying the earliest, most remote and most violent events in the universe. They can help clarify other mysteries, such as the collapse of a star much heavier than the sun into a ball of superneutrons about 12 miles wide, emitting a large number of neutrinos.
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3p is significantBut the budget was small. Almost all the scientists in February and March spent February and March installing and repairing components in camps on Lake Baikal.
Dr. Domogatski said when talking about neutrinos: "It spreads in the universe. There is almost no collision and no one collides." "For this reason, the universe is a transparent world."
Since the Baikal telescope is essentially from The whole planet is seen, so it studied the sky in the southern hemisphere. This makes it a complement to the IceCube in Antarctica, as well as the Mediterranean Mediterranean project in the early stages of construction.
Dr. Spiering said: "We need a product equivalent to the IceCube in the northern hemisphere." Dr. Spiering is still involved in the IceCube and Baikal projects.
Dr. Domogatski said that his team is already exchanging data with neutrino hunters elsewhere and has found evidence to support IceCube's conclusion that neutrinos come from outer space. He still admits that the Baikal project lags far behind other projects in developing the computer software necessary for real-time identification of neutrinos.
Despite the importance of the project, it is still a large budget-almost all of the approximately 60 scientists working on telescopes usually spend their time in camps on Lake Baikal in February and March To install and repair its components. In contrast, IceCube involves about 300 scientists, most of whom have never been to Antarctica.
Today, Dr. Domogatski no longer participates in the annual winter expedition to Lake Baikal. But he still worked at the Soviet-era institute, where he continued the neutrino dream through communism, the chaotic 1990s and more than 20 years of Putin's rule.
Dr. Domogatski said: “If you are going to undertake a project, you must understand that it must be realized under any circumstances.” “Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense even if you start.”
Oleg Oleg Oleg Matsnev contributed research.
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