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EI2GYB > ASTRO 26.10.25 13:37l 99 Lines 5166 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Europe's deep-sea telescope on a hunt for the origins of th
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Europe's deep-sea telescope on a hunt for the origins of the universe
Below the waves of the Mediterranean, Europe's KM3NeT neutrino telescope is on
a cosmic hunt. Towering strings of sensors stretch a kilometer down to the
seafloor, arranged in a vast 3D grid.
Its mission? To capture ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos,
messengers that can travel unhindered across the universe-even through planets
and stars-carrying clues about events far beyond our solar system.
In the early hours of 13 February 2023, KM3NeT detected something astonishing.
An intense flash of pure energy signaled the most energetic neutrino ever
observed-30 times higher than any previous recording. Scientists have been
trying to work out where it came from ever since.
Why chase neutrinos?
Neutrinos were first theorized in the 1930s and detected decades later. They
are among the most abundant particles in the universe, yet also the most
elusive.
Every second, billions of neutrinos pass through our bodies without leaving a
trace. They have no electric charge and almost no mass-at least a million times
lighter than an electron-and they rarely interact with matter, which makes them
extremely hard to detect.
It is this ghostly quality that makes them so fascinating to physicists.
"Neutrinos are the most interesting particles around at the moment," said
Paschal Coyle of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who
coordinates an project called KM3NeT-INFRADEV2 that is supporting the
development of the KM3NeT infrastructure. "There are lots of mysteries
surrounding them. They're the least understood of the fundamental particles."
Because neutrinos can cross the universe without being absorbed, they carry
pristine information from the most extreme environments known to science:
exploding stars, black holes and cosmic collisions.
Studying them could reveal how the universe works-and even why matter exists at
all.
"Neutrinos are the closest thing to nothing we can imagine, but they are key to
fully understanding the workings of the universe," said Coyle.
Ghost hunters
Every so often, a neutrino strikes an atomic nucleus, creating a shower of
secondary particles. In dense, transparent material like ice or water, this
collision releases a faint blue flash of light known as Cherenkov radiation.
KM3NeT's sensors are designed to catch this signal.
This approach is shared by other neutrino observatories, such as IceCube in
Antarctica and Super-Kamiokande in Japan. IceCube scans deep polar ice, while
KM3NeT peers through the dark waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
KM3NeT is one of Europe's flagship research infrastructures and one of the
world's most ambitious physics projects. Backed by an international consortium
with EU and national funding, it consists of two separate installations.
ARCA (Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss), based off the coast of
Sicily, is designed to track high-energy neutrinos from deep space. ORCA
(Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss), near Toulon in France,
focuses on neutrino behavior and mass.
Each array is built from vertical lines of basketball-sized glass spheres
containing ultra-sensitive optical sensors. These lines rise from the seafloor
like underwater skyscrapers, stretching a kilometer into the dark. More than
1,000 modules are already in place, with 6,000 planned by 2027.
"It seemed like a crazy idea to build a detector at the bottom of the sea to
catch these very weird particles," said Aart Heijboer, a senior physicist at
the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, who helped design the
telescope. "That caught my imagination."
All this engineering is for a single purpose: to glimpse those rare flashes
when a neutrino finally reveals itself.
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