After Years of Setbacks, Researchers Finally Prepare Underwater Neutrino Telescope in Siberia (msn.com) 15
The New York Times tells the story of the Baikal-Gigaton Volume Detector, the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere and one of the world's biggest underwater space telescopes, now submerged in the world's deepest lake in Siberia.
The Times includes a quote from 80-year-old Russian physicist Grigori V. Domogatski, who has actually "led the quest" for this underwater telescope for 40 years. "If you take on a project, you must understand that you have to realize it in any conditions that come up," Dr. Domogatski said, banging on his desk for emphasis. "Otherwise, there's no point in even starting." [T]his hunt for neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos, spanning eras in geopolitics and in astrophysics, sheds light on how Russia has managed to preserve some of the scientific prowess that characterized the Soviet Union — as well as the limitations of that legacy... In the 1970s, despite the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets were working together to plan a first deep water neutrino detector off the coast of Hawaii. But after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Soviets were kicked out of the project. So, in 1980, the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow started its own neutrino-telescope effort, led by Dr. Domogatski. The place to try seemed obvious, although it was about 2,500 miles away: Baikal.
The project did not get far beyond planning and design before the Soviet Union collapsed, throwing many of the country's scientists into poverty and their efforts into disarray. But an institute outside Berlin, which soon became part of Germany's DESY particle research center, joined the Baikal effort.... By the mid 1990s, the Russian team had managed to identify "atmospheric" neutrinos — those produced by collisions in Earth's atmosphere — but not ones arriving from outer space. It would need a bigger detector for that. As Russia started to reinvest in science in the 2000s under President Vladimir V. Putin, Dr. Domogatski managed to secure more than $30 million in funding to build a new Baikal telescope...
Construction began in 2015, and a first phase encompassing 2,304 light-detecting orbs suspended in the depths is scheduled to be completed by the time the ice melts in April. (The orbs remain suspended in the water year-round, watching for neutrinos and sending data to the scientists' lakeshore base by underwater cable....) The Baikal telescope looks down, through the entire planet, out the other side, toward the center of our galaxy and beyond, essentially using Earth as a giant sieve. For the most part, larger particles hitting the opposite side of the planet eventually collide with atoms. But almost all neutrinos — 100 billion of which pass through your fingertip every second — continue, essentially, on a straight line. Yet when a neutrino, exceedingly rarely, hits an atomic nucleus in the water, it produces a cone of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. The effect was discovered by the Soviet physicist Pavel A. Cherenkov, one of Dr. Domogatski's former colleagues down the hall at his institute in Moscow. If you spend years monitoring a billion tons of deep water for unimaginably tiny flashes of Cherenkov light, many physicists believe, you will eventually find neutrinos that can be traced back to cosmic conflagrations that emitted them billions of light-years away.
The orientation of the blue cones even reveals the precise direction from which the neutrinos that caused them came.
Business Insider notes it's run by an international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia — and according to Russian news agency TASS cost nearly $34 million.
80-year-old Dr. Domogatski tells the Times, "You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question."
The Times includes a quote from 80-year-old Russian physicist Grigori V. Domogatski, who has actually "led the quest" for this underwater telescope for 40 years. "If you take on a project, you must understand that you have to realize it in any conditions that come up," Dr. Domogatski said, banging on his desk for emphasis. "Otherwise, there's no point in even starting." [T]his hunt for neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos, spanning eras in geopolitics and in astrophysics, sheds light on how Russia has managed to preserve some of the scientific prowess that characterized the Soviet Union — as well as the limitations of that legacy... In the 1970s, despite the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets were working together to plan a first deep water neutrino detector off the coast of Hawaii. But after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Soviets were kicked out of the project. So, in 1980, the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow started its own neutrino-telescope effort, led by Dr. Domogatski. The place to try seemed obvious, although it was about 2,500 miles away: Baikal.
The project did not get far beyond planning and design before the Soviet Union collapsed, throwing many of the country's scientists into poverty and their efforts into disarray. But an institute outside Berlin, which soon became part of Germany's DESY particle research center, joined the Baikal effort.... By the mid 1990s, the Russian team had managed to identify "atmospheric" neutrinos — those produced by collisions in Earth's atmosphere — but not ones arriving from outer space. It would need a bigger detector for that. As Russia started to reinvest in science in the 2000s under President Vladimir V. Putin, Dr. Domogatski managed to secure more than $30 million in funding to build a new Baikal telescope...
Construction began in 2015, and a first phase encompassing 2,304 light-detecting orbs suspended in the depths is scheduled to be completed by the time the ice melts in April. (The orbs remain suspended in the water year-round, watching for neutrinos and sending data to the scientists' lakeshore base by underwater cable....) The Baikal telescope looks down, through the entire planet, out the other side, toward the center of our galaxy and beyond, essentially using Earth as a giant sieve. For the most part, larger particles hitting the opposite side of the planet eventually collide with atoms. But almost all neutrinos — 100 billion of which pass through your fingertip every second — continue, essentially, on a straight line. Yet when a neutrino, exceedingly rarely, hits an atomic nucleus in the water, it produces a cone of blue light called Cherenkov radiation. The effect was discovered by the Soviet physicist Pavel A. Cherenkov, one of Dr. Domogatski's former colleagues down the hall at his institute in Moscow. If you spend years monitoring a billion tons of deep water for unimaginably tiny flashes of Cherenkov light, many physicists believe, you will eventually find neutrinos that can be traced back to cosmic conflagrations that emitted them billions of light-years away.
The orientation of the blue cones even reveals the precise direction from which the neutrinos that caused them came.
Business Insider notes it's run by an international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia — and according to Russian news agency TASS cost nearly $34 million.
80-year-old Dr. Domogatski tells the Times, "You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question."
Globe coverage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Globe coverage (Score:4, Insightful)
Fascinating. FTA:
Using a grid of light detectors similar to the Baikal telescope, IceCube identified a neutrino in 2017 that scientists said almost certainly came from a supermassive black hole. It was the first time that scientists had pinpointed a source of the rain of high-energy particles from space known as cosmic rays — a breakthrough for neutrino astronomy, a branch that remains in its infancy.
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
The Americans spent US $279 million on the one in Antarctica, while this neutrino telescope by the Russians is reported to cost US $30 million... seemingly nothing given the economies of modern nations, yet shamefully, what a small percentage of current budgets goes to science and exploration.
Re: (Score:3)
The point with these projects is that they're but a small portion of a small portion of a small portion of science spending at best. Because they're in a small fraction of astronomy, which is a small fraction of natural sciences, which is a small fraction of totality of sciences.
So spending on such projects should not be massive unless they're extremely necessary/revolutionary. They should be funded in moderation, which is seemingly what has happened here.
Re: Globe coverage (Score:2, Insightful)
So spending on such projects should not be massive unless they're extremely necessary/revolutionary.
Bad metric. This is basic research, so by definition none of it is "necessary".
It may, or may not, give useful results in 80 or 90 years. It may pave the way for inventing a warp drive in 150 years. Or may demark a region of physics as "checked; uninteresting" for somebody else, who instead of going through this again, would instead research the *real* technology behind warp drives, when eventually neutrinos will have been ruled out.
Neutrinos are at the outer frontier of known physics, we still don't unders
Re: Globe coverage (Score:4, Interesting)
>Bad metric. This is basic research, so by definition none of it is "necessary".
You are utterly confused. Basic research by definition is necessary, because new branching fields of applied science come from basic research.
The correct metric, which I'm noting above is "which necessary research should have how much priority?"
Re: Globe coverage (Score:2)
Regarding the merits of basic research we have the same opinion, we're arguing over semantics.
But:
The correct metric, which I'm noting above is "which necessary research should have how much priority?"
You can't decide that a priori, because the effect of a particular piece of basic research is so far away from its performance that you have no way of guessing ahead of time what will be worth an effort. You essentially do research for the love of knowledge, not for its benefits.
So, you essentially finance whatever sounds like a cool idea...
Re: (Score:2)
>You can't decide that a priori, because the effect of a particular piece of basic research is so far away from its performance that you have no way of guessing ahead of time what will be worth an effort. You essentially do research for the love of knowledge, not for its benefits.
Of course you can. It has been done as long as basic research was done. You do best effort analysis of potential research and its potential benefits, and you distribute resources based on it.
Have you never done any investment de
Re: (Score:2)
um.
so how is the fishing at lake baikal
Re: (Score:2)
I too have killed Gahz'ranka.
Gulag science. (Score:1)
Man you know it's bad when a telescope gets sent to Siberia.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the good telescope gets to live in Antarctica.
Science ... (Score:2)
Science is universal, quite literally without a hit of superlative.
Science doesn't care about your petty nationalistic B.S.