China builds world’s largest deep sea telescope to hunt for cosmic neutrinos
- The Trident project will be up to 10,000 times more powerful than the IceCube observatory at the South Pole, researchers said
- The underwater array will detect tiny neutrinos as they arrive from space and collide with water atoms, and could solve a century-old mystery
When completed in 2030, the Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope (Trident) – named Hailing (Ocean Bell) in Chinese – will be the largest and most advanced in the world, according to the project team.
The Trident array will be anchored to the seabed 3.5km (2.2 miles) below the Western Pacific Ocean, where it will scan the surrounding seawater for the flashes of light generated when cosmic neutrinos collide with water molecules.
“Using Earth as a shield, Trident will detect neutrinos penetrating from the opposite side of the planet,” said Xu Donglian of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the project’s chief scientist and spokeswoman, at a news conference on Tuesday.
“As Trident is near the equator, it can receive neutrinos coming from all directions with the rotation of the Earth, enabling all-sky observation without any blind spot.”
Project chair Jing Yipeng told the news conference that the telescope will also help to test space-time symmetries, search for quantum gravity, and indirectly search for dark matter.
