From a network of telescopes nearly as large as Earth to the most massive particle accelerators, researchers are conducting many large-scale experiments to explore the mysteries of nature and the universe.
Hunting for gravitational waves
Ripples in the universe’s gravitational field, called gravitational waves, are the remnants of massive galactic events such as colliding black holes and merging neutron stars. They can even record echoes of the Big Bang. To detect them, researchers need large equipment such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
LIGO consists of two large instruments, each with two 4 km long arms. The devices are located in Washington and Louisiana, about 3,000 km apart. Their arms are laser interferometers, arranged in an L shape. The laser beam is split in half, each half traveling along one arm. At the end of each arm is a series of mirrors that reflect each half of the laser beam about a few hundred times, then return to the arm to recombine.
By examining the interference pattern, peak and trough of the coherent light wave, the scientist can determine whether absorption ripples appear in the experiment. If so, they can study it in detail. The larger the arm, the more sensitive the device. That’s why LIGO has the longest laser interferometer ever built.
LIGO has detected every aspect of this mysterious phenomenon, from the merger between neutron stars and ultramassive black holes to multiple collisions between neutron stars.
The world’s largest particle accelerator
To study very small objects, scientists sometimes have to use large-scale equipment such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), this circular machine with a diameter of 27 km has four detectors named ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. Weighing 7,700 tons, ATLAS is the largest particle detector ever built. The device measures a series of subatomic particles created when scientists let beams of particles collide with each other at high speeds, creating collisions that give rise to never-before-seen elementary particles like the Higgs boson.
LHC uses more than 9,000 tons of iron in the magnetic system and enough niobium – titanium cables to stretch from the Earth to the Sun and vice versa 6 times. It is also the largest and largest refrigerator on Earth because the magnet must keep it at -271.25 degrees Celsius, slightly colder than space.
Huge carbon capture facility
By 2050, humans need to remove 6 – 10 billion tons of carbon to avoid reaching the warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement. The world’s first commercial-scale undersea carbon capture project aims to remove carbon from the ocean.
In nature, the ocean absorbs carbon from the air, but it cannot absorb it fast enough to make a difference in climate in a single person’s lifetime. Equatic aims to accelerate that timeline. Equatic’s commercial plant takes five minutes to remove a ton of carbon by pumping seawater, running an electric current through it, then exposing the seawater to atmospheric gas flows, according to the company’s chief executive officer Edward Sanders. . The equivalent of an ocean takes 12 months to remove one ton of carbon.
The chemical process that removes carbon from seawater also produces hydrogen that is used by many industries and can be burned as fuel, reducing the energy costs of carbon capture by 40%. The carbon is then separated as bicarbonate. This helps remove carbon from the atmosphere for up to 10,000 years. Bicarbonate can be returned to the sea, used as fertilizer or construction material in coastal reclamation. Equatic’s facility in Quebec aims to remove 109,500 tons of carbon per year from 2027.
Searching for ghost particles on Antarctic ice
Neutrinos are often called “ghost particles” because these nearly massless particles have virtually no interaction when passing through matter, so they are difficult to detect. But searching for neutrinos from distant cosmic sources could be a way to observe and analyze high-energy environments such as pulsars, supernovae and black holes, said Albrecht Karle, an assistant professor of physics at the University of London. Wisconsin – Madison.
Karle is deputy director of science and instrumentation at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a research facility unique in both its size and remoteness. IceCube consists of a series of optical detectors on long fibers, running through boreholes 1,450 – 2,450 m deep in the Antarctic ice. When a neutrino interacts with ice, it creates other particles, emitting tiny flashes of light. The detector detects this light and can measure its wavelength to reveal the existence of the neutrino and its origin.
Data from IceCube allowed scientists to create the first map of the Milky Way, using matter instead of light. The observatory also revealed strange, difficult-to-explain high-energy cosmic rays. Karle and his colleagues are planning IceCube Gen-2, expanding the observatory eight times its current size, with a 500 square kilometer radio detector cluster to enhance detection of incoming neutrinos. The expansion will greatly increase the detector’s sensitivity and better classify transmitted neutrinos.
The telescope network spans nearly the entire world
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a network of radio telescopes spanning from Greenland to Antarctica (north to south) and from Spain to Hawaii (east to west). The exact number of observatories in the EHT changes over time (11 in 2021) and many new telescopes will be added in the future, including one in the Canary Islands.
These observatories work together to detect the weakest radio signals associated with the black hole. The result of the collaboration is the first ever image of a black hole, including the outline of the event horizon, the boundary beyond which no light or matter can escape. Scientists also observed the rotation of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the giant electromagnetic rays emitted from the supermassive black hole in the center of the Perseus A galaxy.
The EHT needs to be very large because it relies on the ability to continuously observe the universe for 8-14 hours from several angles, according to Black Hole Partnerships for International Research and Education, the organization that collaborated on the development of the algorithm used by the telescope. These algorithms also rely on Earth’s rotation to coordinate observations, allowing researchers to combine images from multiple telescopes.