Tuesday, May 30, 2006
The aim is to study the universe's the majority elusive particle, the neutrino, and through that to appreciate more about the complexity of space and how it develops. Billions of these ethereal entities zip through our planet every next on their journeys across space from distant black holes, galaxies and also exploding stars. The seabed telescope would track them as they pass through the Earth.
"Neutrinos are the closest thing to nothing you can study" said one of the project's leaders, Dr Lee Thompson, of Sheffield University. "Unlike light - which is often blocked or hidden as it travels through space - neutrinos pass through everything. That makes them an amazingly rich source of information about the distant universe. The only problem is that they tend to pass through telescopes and detectors as well."
However, scientists have found that neutrinos infrequently strike atoms in such a way that they emit brief, faint pulses of light. The seabed telescope, which is being intended by a consortium of European scientists, including groups at Aberdeen, Liverpool and Sheffield universities, would exploit this effect.
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