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China's massive detector ‘JUNO’ to soon begin work on this mystery of nature
Scientists have known about the existence of neutrinos for almost a century, but they’re still in the early stages of knowing what the particles really are.
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory being built underneath a granite hill in southern China is a massive detector that is nearly complete and will soon begin its work to sniff out the mysterious ghost particles called neutrinos.
The observatory will soon begin the difficult task of spotting the tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass.
This is a part of three such detectors being built across the globe to study these elusive ghost particles in the finest detail yet. The other two are based in the United States and Japan, and are in different stages of construction. They’re set to go online around 2027 and 2031 and will cross-check the China detector’s results using different approaches
The Chinese detector will start its operations in the second half of 2025.
Neutrinos detection is a big step in the quest to understand how the universe came to be. The new detector will push the technology to new limits, AFP reported, quoting Andre de Gouvea, a theoretical physicist at Northwestern University.
The $300 million detector in Kaiping, China, took over nine years to build. Its location, 2,297 feet (700 meters) underground, protects from pesky cosmic rays and radiation that could throw off its neutrino-sniffing abilities.
On Wednesday, workers began the final step in construction. Eventually, they'll fill the orb-shaped detector with a liquid designed to emit light when neutrinos pass through and submerge the whole thing in purified water.
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What are neutrinos?
Neutrinos date back to the Big Bang, and trillions zoom through our bodies every second. They spew from stars like the sun and stream out when atomic bits collide in a particle accelerator.
Scientists have known about the existence of neutrinos for almost a century, but they’re still in the early stages of figuring out what the particles really are.
“It’s the least understood particle in our world. That’s why we need to study it,” Cao Jun, who helps manage the detector known as JUNO, was quoted by AFP as saying.
There’s no way to spot the tiny neutrinos whizzing around on their own. Instead, scientists measure what happens when they collide with other bits of matter, producing flashes of light or charged particles.
Neutrinos bump into other particles only very rarely, so to up their chances of catching a collision, physicists have to think big.
The detector is specially designed to answer a key question about a longstanding mystery. Neutrinos switch between three flavors as they zip through space, and scientists want to rank them from lightest to heaviest.
Though neutrinos barely interact with other particles, they’ve been around since the dawn of time. Studying these Big Bang relics can clue scientists into how the universe evolved and expanded billions of years ago.
One question researchers hope neutrinos can help answer is why the universe is overwhelmingly made up of matter with its opposing counterpart — called antimatter — largely snuffed out.
Scientists don't know how things got to be so out of balance, but they think neutrinos could have helped write the earliest rules of matter.
The proof, scientists say, may lie in the particles. They'll have to catch them to find out.
