The lake is up to a mile deep, with some of the world’s clearest fresh water, and a Caesarist-era rail easily skirts the southern coast. Most important, it is covered in winter by a three-foot thick sheet of snow: the ideal platform for nature to set up an underwater photomultiplier array.
“It’s just like Baikal is designed for this type of research,” said researcher Barr Shaybanov on the project.
Construction began in 2015, and the first phase of 2,304 light detection orbs suspended at depth is scheduled to be completed by the time the ice melts in April. (Orbins remain suspended in the water round, looking at neutrinos and sending data to an scientists’ lakeshore base by underwater cable.) The telescope has been collecting data for years, but Russia’s science minister, Valery Ann. Falkov took the plunge. Seen in the snow as part of a series Opening ceremony for a television this month.
The Baikal telescope looks down, through the entire planet, out from the other side, towards the center of our galaxy and beyond, essentially using the Earth as a giant strainer. For the most part, large particles hitting the opposite side of the planet eventually collide with atoms. But almost all neutrinos – 100 billion of which pass through your fingers every second – continue, essentially, on a straight line.
Nevertheless, when a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atomic nucleus in water, it produces a cone of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. Soviet physicist Pavel A. discovered this effect. It was done by Cherenkov, who Drs. Was one of Domogatsky’s former colleagues who entered the hall at his institution in Moscow.
If you spend years monitoring a billion tons of deep water for the unimaginably small flashes of Chernakov light, many physicists believe, you’ll eventually find neutrinos that can detect cosmic illusions that billions of light years. Have gone away
The orientation of the blue cones also reveals the exact direction from which the neutrinos produced them. By not having an electric charge, neutrinos are not affected by interstellar and intergalactic magnetic fields and other effects that scratch the pathways of other types of cosmic particles, such as protons and electrons. Neutrinos move directly through the universe Einstein’s gravity will allow.