Huge telescope to be installed in Mediterranean
Baku, December 27 (AZERTAC). Telescopes come in all shapes and sizes - from orbiting space telescopes just a few metres long to the ambitious `square kilometer array` planned for South Africa or Australia, where a network of linked dishes will stare at the sky together. But detecting neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass easily through matter - is more difficult. Neutrino detectors are often located deep underground, to cut out interference. A new telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometers - each detector is taller than the 830m Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. The KM3net telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometres, built to detect neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass straight through water and even solid rock. `Any time you detect a particle, what you`re always doing is having the particle interact with some kind of matter, whether it`s water, steel, air or ice,` says Peter Fisher, a particle physicist at MIT. `The less the particle interacts, the more material you need for it to interact in.` The sea water in between the 900m KM3Net detectors works as a giant optical `detector` - the detectors look for `flashes` caused by neutrinos hitting water atoms. Most of the neutrinos pass straight through, but the few that do collide with atoms will be picked up by the huge telescope. The detector`s discoveries could propel research in dark matter and high energy physics. Construction could start as early as next year. Over the past decade the three pilot projects have explored the idea, building and deploying smaller scale prototype telescopes designed to operate at depths ranging from 2500 to 4500 m. Antares - on the floor of the Mediterranean near Toulon, France - is now the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern hemispere, made of twelve 350-metre detectors on the sea bed. `The Mediterranean Sea is ideal for these huge structures - thanks to water of excellent optical properties at the right depth and excellent shore-baseddata processing,` says the KM3Net organisation. `The KM3NeT neutrino telescope will be unique in the world in its physics sensitivity and will provide access to scientific data that will propel research in different fields, including astronomy, dark matter searches, cosmic ray and high energy physics.`
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