Russian scientists drop a telescope into the deepest lake on Earth

On Saturday, a team of Russian researchers launched a new telescope into the refrigerator Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth. It was not an accident; the instrument took the step to give scientists a better chance of detecting neutrinos, dodgy subatomic particles that are extremely difficult to detect, as they often pass through matter without a trace.

It may seem counterintuitive to try to get a better view of space from almost a mile underwater. But yes look for neutrinos coming from space instead of light, this location makes a lot more senseis. Neutrinos cut the most common matter like butter: Band by the time you get to the end of that sentence, they’ll have hundreds of billions of neutrinos removed through your body. When that travels by some means, such as water, however, particles can sometimes leave evidence of their existence.

Lake Baikal contains more water than all the Great Lakes put together, making it an ideal place to observe these annoying little particles. Thus, the Russians, in collaboration with Czech, German, Polish and Slovak researchers, splashed the neutrino sensor in the lake, about 3 kilometers from the coast. (In Irkutsk, the lake is icy and is a destination for all kinds, from particle physicists to Instagram influencers).

The Russian telescope is not the first to look for neutrinos in foreign terrain; The United States has a nickname detector Ice which consists of a cubic kilometer of ice at the south pole. This one also has a no doubt less catchy name: the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector, or Baikal-GVD in short.

Resembling a technological crystal ball, with its circuits visible through the clear glass sphere, the telescope is configured to detect neutrinos about a third of a mile away in any direction, or as far as the CN tower. of Toronto is high. Finally, Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research he told AFP, this distance would be doubled.

“Of course, Lake Baikal is the only lake where a neutrino telescope can be deployed because of its depth,” Bair Shoibonov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. “Fresh water is also important, as is the clarity of the water. And the fact that there is ice cover for two, two and a half months is also very important ”.

Scientists want to detect neutrinos for many reasons. On the one hand, learning more about the behavior of neutrinos could help us understand this why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.