2023-11-01 18:01:12
China has begun building the world’s largest neutrino telescope in the South China Sea near the equator. The telescope, which is 4km in diameter, detects neutrinos pouring in from space to find clues to solving mysteries surrounding the origin of the universe and the structure of dark matter. China said, “We will push the performance of neutrino telescopes to the limit and reach new boundaries in neutrino observation.” The scale of telescopes that explore the universe and trace the origins of the Earth is getting bigger. The larger the telescope, the more light, radio waves, and particles it can collect. That means you can see further and in more detail. Park Byeong-gon, head of the Large Telescope Division of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, said, “A telescope is a vessel that collects particles such as light, and the larger the vessel, the more dark light it can collect from space.” He added, “The size of astronomical telescopes doubles approximately every 45 years. ◇The world’s largest ‘neutrino telescope’ Last month, China published detailed plans for ‘TRIDENT’, a tropical deep-sea neutrino telescope to be built under 3,500m under the sea, in the international academic journal ‘Nature Astronomy’. Trident has more than 24,000 optical sensor beads attached to 1,211 strings 700m long, and when it starts operating, it can detect neutrinos coming in the range of 7.5㎦. Currently, the world’s largest neutrino detector, the ‘Ice Cube’ in Antarctica, has a detection area of 1㎦. Neutrinos have a mass close to 0 and have no charge, so they do not interact with other substances. For this reason, neutrinos are also called ‘ghost particles’. More than 100 billion neutrinos pass through our bodies every moment, but they are so difficult to detect that we cannot actually tell. Scientists have found a way to detect neutrinos through optical sensors, focusing on the fact that neutrinos generate energy and light when they collide with ice or water particles. Through this, we opened the era of ‘neutrino astronomy’, which traces the source of neutrinos and observes the universe using neutrinos rather than light. The Trident research team said, “The reason Trident is built near the equator is because all neutrinos coming to Earth can be detected without blind spots using the Earth’s rotation.” Graphics = Ha-kyung Kim ◇ ‘The world’s largest eye’ to see the sky Germany and the UK The world’s largest optical telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which is being promoted by European countries, is also being built in the Atacama Desert in Chile with the goal of making the first observations in 2028. E-ELT’s primary mirror, made of 798 small 1.4m hexagonal mirrors, has a diameter of approximately 39m. Although there were difficulties at one time, such as construction delays due to the coronavirus, construction progress is currently exceeding 50% and is cruising. The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is leading the development, said, “ELT might be the first telescope to discover evidence of life outside the solar system,” and added, “Through ELT, we will solve the biggest scientific challenges of our time.” .The ‘Large Magellan Telescope (GMT)’ has also entered the final stages of production. GMT is a next-generation very large telescope with an aperture of 25.4 m, and 13 global organizations, including the United States and Korea, are participating in its production. GMT arranges seven circular reflectors with a diameter of 8.4m and a weight of 17 tons in a honeycomb shape to achieve the same performance as a single reflector with a diameter of 25.4m. Production of the seventh and final reflector began last October, and the first observation is expected to begin in 2029. GMT has four times clearer resolution and 200 times higher sensitivity than the James Webb Space Telescope. It is expected to make a significant contribution to uncovering the mystery of the birth of the Earth and the universe by observing the most distant space in human history, from analyzing the atmospheric composition of exoplanets to searching for planets with an environment similar to Earth. Director Park said, “E-ELT is larger, but there are many mirrors used and the loss due to reflection is large, so the performance will be similar to GMT.”
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