Science and techno world topic: Physics
Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope,
buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny
particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was
made.
The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build
2,400 meters below the Antarctic ice. At one cubic km, it is bigger than the
Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower - now known as Willis Tower -
and Shanghai's World Financial Center combined.
Designed to observe neutrinos, which are emitted by
exploding stars and move close to the speed of light, the telescope is
attracting new attention in the wake of last week's discovery of a particle
that appears to be the Higgs boson - a basic building block of the universe.
"You hold up your finger and a hundred billion
neutrinos pass through it every second from the sun," said Jenni Adams, a
physicist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who works on IceCube.
IceCube is essentially a string of light detectors buried
in the ice through hot water drilling. When neutrinos, which are everywhere,
interact in the ice, they produce charged particles that then create light,
which can be detected.
The ice acts as a net that isolates the neutrinos, making
them easier to observe. It also protects the telescope from potentially
damaging radiation.
"If a supernova goes off in our galaxy now, we can
detect hundreds of neutrinos with IceCube," Adams told reporters at the
International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne.
"We won't be able to see them individually, but the
whole detector will just light up like a massive fireworks display."
Scientists are attempting to track the particles to
discover their points of origin, in the hope that will give clues on what
happens in space, particularly in unseen parts of the universe known as dark
matter.
Before IceCube was completed in 2010, scientists had
observed just 14 neutrinos. With the huge new instrument, paired with another
telescope in the Mediterranean, hundreds of neutrinos have been detected.
So far, all of those have been created in the earth's
atmosphere, but IceCube scientists hope to eventually detect those from space.
"Neutrinos ... will point back to where they came
from," Adams said.
Source: Reuters
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