On Saturday, scientists launched one of the largest underwater telescopes into the waters of Siberian Lake Baikal, which is intended to observe elementary particles of neutrinos and help reveal the secrets of the formation of galaxies and the universe, the TASS agency reported. The Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Germany are also participating in an international scientific project led by Russia.
The telescope, called Baikal-GVD (short for Gigaton Volume Detector), which began construction in 2015, was placed to a depth of 750 meters to 1.3 kilometers at a distance of about four kilometers from the shores of Lake Baikal.
“The half-cubic-kilometer neutrino telescope is located directly below us,” Dmitry Naumov of the Russian Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP.
Neutrinos are difficult to detect and water is a convenient medium for recording. They are particles with a very low mass, whose speed is close to the speed of light.
The task of the Baikal-GVD telescope will be to record currents of neutrinos coming to Earth from space, from nascent or dying galaxies, and from various stellar objects, the TASS agency wrote.
Scientists believe that neutrinos are able to reach Earth on a fundamentally unchanged form, providing a valuable source of information about what happened in space billions of years ago, as well as the objects from which the particles formed.
Lake Baikal’s telescope is the largest of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere and will now compete with the Ice Cube, Antarctica’s giant neutrino observatory.
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