Underneath a granite hill in southern China, a massive detector is nearly complete that will sniff out the mysterious ghost particles lurking around us. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory will soon begin the difficult task of spotting neutrinos: tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass. The detector is one of three being built across the globe to study these elusive ghost particles in the finest detail yet, the AP reports. The other two, based in the United States and Japan, are still under construction.
Spying neutrinos is no small feat in the quest to understand how the universe came to be. The Chinese effort, set to go online next year, will push the technology to new limits, said Andre de Gouvea, a theoretical physicist at Northwestern University who is not involved with the project. "If they can pull that off," he said, "it would be amazing." What are neutrinos? The particles date back to the Big Bang, and trillions zoom through our bodies every second. They spew from stars like the sun and stream out when atomic bits collide in a particle accelerator.
Scientists have known about the existence of neutrinos for almost a century, but they're still in the early stages of figuring out what the particles really are. "It's the least understood particle in our world," said Cao Jun, who helps manage the detector known as JUNO. "That's why we need to study it." There's no way to spot the tiny neutrinos whizzing around on their own. Instead, scientists measure what happens when they collide with other bits of matter, producing flashes of light or charged particles. Neutrinos bump into other particles only very rarely, so to up their chances of catching a collision, physicists have to build huge detectors.
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The $300 million detector in Kaiping, China, took over nine years to build. Its location 2,297 feet underground protects from pesky cosmic rays and radiation that could throw off its neutrino-sniffing abilities. On Wednesday, workers began the final step in construction. Eventually, they'll fill the orb-shaped detector with a liquid designed to emit light when neutrinos pass through and submerge the whole thing in purified water. China's detector is set to operate during the second half of next year. After that, it'll take some time to collect and analyze the data—so scientists will have to keep waiting to fully unearth the secret lives of neutrinos. (Read more about the fascinating particles here.)
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