What do people rely on to understand the universe? In addition to visible light, there are also mysterious neutrinos. They hardly react with matter and can escape from the dense celestial environment, making them a powerful tool for studying extreme universes. Xu Donglian, a Li Zhengdao scholar and project chief scientist at the Li Zhengdao Research Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said that the team is building a high-performance neutrino telescope called Hailing at the bottom of the sea to capture high-energy neutrinos and solve unsolved puzzles such as the origin of cosmic rays. Academician Jing Yipeng, the project leader of the Bell Telescope, introduced the project (photographed on October 10, 2023). As a subatomic particle with a quantity second only to photons, the birth of neutrinos is often related to extreme events in the universe, such as the Big Bang, supernova explosions, binary neutron star mergers, black hole explosions, etc. Among them, high-energy neutrinos mainly originate from the collision of cosmic rays with dust and gas. Xu Donglian introduced that the Hailing Telescope project was launched at the end of 2022 and is expected to be completed around 2030. It is located in a deep-sea plain near the equator in China's waters, with a depth of about 3.5 kilometers. It has a diameter of about 4 kilometers and covers an area of about 12 square kilometers. It consists of 1200 cables and has a designed lifespan of 20 years. Concept map of the Hailing Telescope. The telescope array has approximately 1200 vertical cables, each with approximately 20 optical modules. According to the design, these cables are anchored vertically on the seabed like giant seaweed, each about 700 meters long and spaced 70 to 110 meters apart from each other. Each cable carries about 20 optical detection pods, like strings of bells in the deep sea, waiting for the arrival of high-energy neutrinos. Astronomical diagram of neutrinos. Neutrinos can easily escape from extreme and dense cosmic and celestial environments, and their propagation in the universe does not change direction due to magnetic fields. They are ideal messengers for tracing the origin and studying extreme celestial phenomena. It is worth mentioning that the Hailing Telescope looks up at the universe in a unique way, not upwards, but downwards. "The Hailing Telescope will use the entire Earth as a shield to capture high-energy neutrinos penetrating from the opposite side of the Earth, and achieve 360 degree global exploration through the Earth's rotation," said Xu Donglian. The team expects that within one year after the completion of the Hailing Telescope, a stable neutrino source in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1068 in the constellation Cetus can be discovered, and a neutrino explosion similar to TXS 0506+056 celestial body can be discovered. This active galaxy black hole is covered in a large amount of dust, and even high-energy photons cannot escape, but neutrinos have escaped. The Hailing Telescope is located in the low latitude near equatorial region and can conduct 360 degree sky surveys as the Earth rotates, complementing other neutrino telescopes on a global scale. (Picture provided by the interviewees) Jing Yipeng, an academician of the CAS Member and head of the Hailing Telescope project, said that China has a layout of multi band telescopes, space gravitational waves and low-energy neutrino observation stations. The Hailing high-energy neutrino telescope will fill an important part of China's multi messenger astronomical observation network that is still vacant, and promote and improve the construction of China's multi messenger astronomical observation network. (Lai Xin She)
Edit：Hou Wenzhe Responsible editor：WeiZe
Source：XinhuaNet
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