![]() ![]() Pretty much everything blocks anything that isn't a neutrino. The only way around this is to block everything that isn't a neutrino. But lots of other things also cause small bursts of energy. A neutrino detector is mostly just a giant chunk of matter, and some detectors that can sense those small bursts of energy. When a neutrino hits a piece of matter, it releases a small amount of energy. But because the rate of neutrino detection depends on how much matter you are observing, and less on the arrangement of that matter, it'd just be more efficient to build a giant sphere of matter, carefully measured for neutrinos. ![]() If you built an extremely long detector (preferably hundreds of meters), you would detect neutrinos on rare occasion. If you could somehow see neutrinos, the earth would look like a particularly faint, spherical, nebulae (if it could be seen at all). Nebulae are light-years across, with only a few motes of dust every meter. It happens, but you need huge amounts of matter for it to happen. Neutrinos hit solid chunks of matter about less often than a particle of light strikes a piece of dust in a nebulae in space. By volume, it's around one billion billion (10 to the 18th power) times smaller. ![]() Unfortunately, atomic nuclei are ridiculously small in comparison to the atom itself - by diameter, the atomic nuclei is about a million times smaller than the size of the atom itself. For a neutrino to have an effect on ordinary matter, it has to strike the nucleus of an atom. First and foremost, Neutrinos only rarely interact with ordinary matter. There are a few difficulties in building Neutrino detectors. We’d love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at. “We need the greatest possible depth - over a kilometer.”īaikal-GVD is now the second largest underwater neutrino detector in the world - only Antarctica’s IceCube is bigger - and its creators plan to add even more modules in the coming years, all in the hopes of gaining insights into the mysterious “ghost particles” all around us. “Lake Baikal is perhaps the only lake where a neutrino telescope can be deployed because of its depth,” Bair Shoibonov, a scientist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow, told AFP. These modules are strung like pearls in clusters that extend from 2,500 to 4,300 feet below the surface of Lake Baikal. It consists of more than 2,300 orb-like optical modules that can detect Cherenkov radiation. The new neutrino detector in Siberia is called the Baikal deep underwater neutrino telescope (or Baikal-GVD), and it’s a collaboration between scientists in Russia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Lake Baikal is perhaps the only lake where a neutrino telescope can be deployed. (Water is also dense and filters nearly all of the other radiation that could interfere with the measurements.) The best place for that neutrino detector is deep underwater - when passing through water, the particles move at incredible speeds, and that produces a type of light called Cherenkov radiation that can be recorded and studied. ![]()
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