Release of the blueprint for the "Hailing Plan" of the South China Sea Neutrino Telescope
2023-10-12
For hundreds of years, scientists have been conducting astronomical observations by using telescopes to capture cosmic photons. Now, because neutrinos can easily escape the extreme, dense universe and celestial environment without changing their direction, scientists can choose neutrinos with ghostly strong penetration to explore the mysteries of the universe. On October 10th, at the press conference on the achievements of the "Hailing Plan" of the South China Sea Neutrino Telescope at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Li Zhengdao Research Institute officially released the blueprint for the "Hailing Plan". The project is led by Jing Yipeng, an academician of the CAS Member, and led by Xu Donglian, a scholar of Li Zhengdao, who will explore and build China's first deep-sea neutrino telescope to explore the extreme universe by capturing high-energy (sub TeV to PeV) celestial neutrinos. It is reported that the "Hailing Plan" team has completed the first sea trial mission, verified the feasibility of candidate sea areas as neutrino telescope sites, and completed the conceptual design of the "Hailing" telescope. The related paper was published in Nature Astronomy on October 9th. The "Hailing Pathfinder" project team has conducted sea trials and discovered a deep-sea plain with a depth of about 3.5 kilometers in the northern South China Sea. The seabed is flat, and the flow velocity is gentle within a height range of several hundred meters from the seabed. The measured radioactivity of the seawater is consistent with the publicly available data of ordinary seawater. Xu Donglian introduced that the "Hailing" telescope will use the entire Earth as a shield to receive neutrinos penetrating from across the Earth. "Due to its location near the equator, the" Hailing "telescope can detect neutrinos in 360 degrees across the sky through Earth's rotation, achieving dead angle observation of neutrinos in different directions, complementing the Antarctic" Ice Cube "and other neutrino telescopes in the northern hemisphere," Xu Donglian said. The Ice Cube is currently the world's largest and most sensitive neutrino telescope, with its detector array built in the Antarctic ice layer at a depth of 2500 meters. The first phase of the "Hailing Plan" project has been launched at the end of 2022. It is planned to build a series of 10 telescopes in selected sea areas and connect them to a base on an island in the South China Sea through long-distance submarine cables. It is expected to build the world's first small near-equatorial neutrino telescope by 2026, conduct search for celestial sources inside and outside the Milky Way, and complete the full chain technical verification of constructing a large array. The reporter learned that the "Hailing" detector array will be composed of 1200 vertical cables, each about 700 meters long, with cable spacing of 70-100 meters, growing vertically on the seabed like seaweed. These cables carry a total of 24000 high-resolution optical detection balls, with a total array diameter of about 4 kilometers and a total area of about 12 square kilometers. The volume of seawater that can monitor high-energy neutrino reactions is about 7.5 cubic kilometers, and the designed lifespan is 20 years. Scientists predict that within one year of the completion of the "Hailing" detector array, a stable neutrino source of the rod spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus can be discovered, and a neutrino explosion similar to the supermassive black hole initially observed by the "Ice Cube" using 10 years of data can be discovered. The "Hailing" telescope will become the most advanced neutrino telescope in the world around 2030. (New News Agency)
Edit:Hu Sen Ming Responsible editor:Li Xi
Source:XinhuaNet
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