Two deep-sea telescopes will look for neutrinos

BBC : Two new neutrino-hunting telescopes are being designed for underwater locations, writes Katia Moskvitch for the BBC. To screen out other particles that bombard Earth from above, such telescopes need to be in as deep and dark a place as possible, such as inside mountains, underground, and even in solid ice. The Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) will replace the existing NT-200, a small octopus-like device floating more than 1 km below the surface of Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. Much more massive will be the KM3NeT (kilometer-cubed neutrino telescope), which will sit at depths of 3–5 km at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The telescope will consist of hundreds of vertical strings, each supporting dozens of sensors. Because each string is almost 1 km long, the entire structure will be taller than the tallest building in the world, the 830-m Burj Khalifa in Dubai. To cover the entire Earth, those two big, powerful detectors, both located in the Northern Hemisphere, will complement IceCube , located in the ice at the South Pole. Scientists believe that neutrinos, which can speed through space with an almost total lack of deviation or absorption, could hold the key to understanding the early universe.