China has completed the construction of the gigantic transparent spherical detector designed to capture the elusive neutrinos, known as “ghost particles”, in order to reveal the mysteries of the universe, reported this Friday the state agency Xinhua.
This project, whose construction began in 2015, was scheduled to begin operations in 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors delayed the completion of its works until today, and the entry into operation until August 2025.
The device is located 700 meters underground in a granite layer in Kaiping, Jiangmen city, southern Guangdong province, and is expected to operate for at least 30 years.
The detector, an acrylic sphere 35.4 meters in diameter and 12 stories high is the core of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a project launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Guangzhou government.
It is expected that the observatory helps study the mass hierarchy of neutrinos which could revolutionize physical models of the universe.
JUNO will also allow us to observe phenomena such as supernovae and solar neutrinos, contributing to cutting-edge scientific research.
China is also currently building the Tropical Sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT), located 3,500 meters underwater in an abyssal plain near the equator in China’s maritime area and which will have a diameter of 4 kilometers and a area of 12 square kilometers to investigate the origin of cosmic rays and other space phenomena.
The equipment will be placed on the seabed and It will use the Earth as a shield to capture high-energy neutrinos that penetrate from the other side of the globe.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles fundamental to understanding how the universe works on the smallest scales.so scientists around the world, such as at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), located next to Geneva, have accelerated research on them in recent years.