Ice telescope offers new window to universe

[obby]

Ice telescope offers new window to universe
Project at South Pole would detect faint, distant particles
By JOHN FAUBER
of the Journal Sentinel staff
Last Updated: Oct. 27, 2000
Imagine a telescope that weighs one billion tons, a mile-deep, mile-wide device filled with crystal clear South Pole ice rather than optical glass and that can see to the very far reaches of space.

This $243 million neutrino telescope, the brainchild of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists and the National Science Foundation, is close to becoming a reality.

Already sunk deep under the ice of Antarctica is a much smaller version of the telescope. Known as AMANDA (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array), the $10 million project became fully operational in February.

Now UW and National Science Foundation scientists say they are close to getting funding for an ice-bound, high-energy neutrino telescope that will be 50 times bigger.

As part of the science foundation's budget, the project will be put on the next president's desk in January, said Erick Chiang, head of the foundation's polar research support section. The project already has been studied and recommended by an independent panel of scientists.

"The reviews have been very, very positive," he said.

If approved, it will be the biggest science project at the South Pole, he said.

High-energy neutrino telescopes are a novel new way of searching the skies.

Instead of visible light, these telescopes attempt to catch glimpses of ghostly particles known as neutrinos. Detecting these particles could dramatically expand the field of deep-space astronomy and bring important messages and understanding from the very edge of the universe.

But unlike other advanced telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, both orbiting the earth, an ice-bound neutrino telescope has special advantages.

"We can do astronomy and astrophysics that NASA can never do," said Dennis Peacock, head of the science foundation's Antarctic sciences section. "NASA is never going to send up a billion-ton neutrino telescope."

The search for cosmic neutrinos has been going on for several years.

Every day millions of neutrinos, racing across the universe, pass through your body. But because they have no electrical charge and virtually no mass, they are nearly impossible to detect. In fact, physicists consider them "anti-social" particles because they interact with nothing. They are unaffected by interstellar magnetic fields and unabsorbed by matter.

It has been theorized that neutrinos must exist as a product of the radioactive decay of neutrons breaking down into protons and electrons.

Recent efforts to find neutrinos have involved the use of water storage tanks deep underground, which block out cosmic rays that bombard the earth along with neutrinos.

However, the UW-led project at the South Pole has advanced neutrino-hunting to an unprecedented level. Using ice instead of water, the AMANDA project now is the world's largest neutrino telescope.

The project includes hundreds of modules - basketball-sized orbs - sunk in strings about a mile under the ice. Each module has a device known as a photomultiplier.

Unlike other telescopes, it looks down from the South Pole for neutrinos traveling through the Earth. In doing so, it avoids interference from cosmic rays that do not penetrate the Earth.

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By some estimates, trillions of neutrinos pass through every square meter of the Earth's surface every second. They leave no trace, but occasionally their presence can be detected.

On rare occasions, a neutrino will smash directly into a proton or neutron. From the crash, a new particle known as a muon will be created. Unlike neutrinos, muons are detectable. The faint blue light given off by muons can be picked up by the photomultipliers.

Much like a billiard ball hit straight on, the muon travels in the same path as the neutrino, which allows scientists to determine where in the universe the neutrino came from. Thus, a downward-looking telescope can explore the far reaches of space.

Sources of the neutrinos are many, including supernovas, quasars and neutron stars in our own galaxy and elsewhere, and massive black holes throughout the universe.

In essence, neutrino telescopes open a new window to the universe not available from conventional astronomy, said Bob Morse, a UW professor of physics who helped oversee construction of AMANDA and is working for funding of the bigger project.

And that window could become a veritable panorama in the near future.

Dubbed Ice Cube, the new project will include 5,000 photomultiplier modules buried throughout a cubic kilometer of ice. It will be able to detect more faint and distant objects.

Like the optical telescope and more advanced astronomy equipment that followed, the ice-bound neutrino telescope will advance our knowledge of space and how the universe was formed, Morse said.

But its biggest dividend likely will be the unexpected breakthroughs it brings, he said.

"It's like when the world was uncharted," he said. "Every time someone opened up a new window to the universe, new phenomena were discovered."

[yume]

Thats crazy.

[swirlundergrounder]

Funny how man has to build big things to detect the smallest things.

I can't remember where the following was built but a large team of scientist dug a tunnel about a mile deep into the Earth and flooded it with water in an attempt to detect the 'Higgs Boson' which is thought to be smaller than a quark on the atomic scale...