|
KM3NeT-ARCA, an underwater telescope situated 3,500 meters beneath the surface of Capo Passero in Italy, recently attained a historic milestone by capturing a record neutrino. These particles, which are referred to as "ghosts" due to their ability to pass through nearly everything without pause, contain valuable information from the outer reaches of the universe. The detected signal is the most energetic yet seen: a cosmic "messenger" that traveled billions of years before reaching Italian sensors. To intercept it, researchers at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) placed long chains of electronic "eyes" (optical modules) on the seabed, taking advantage of the abyss's complete darkness. When a neutrino passes through water, it emits a small flash of blue light that the telescope detects, allowing it to reconstruct the particle's route back to its source, which may be a black hole or a supernova explosion. The facility is expanding to become the world's largest underwater eye, establishing Italy as a global leader in this new field of astronomy. Installing ultra-technological sensors at a depth of 3,500 meters is a massive engineering challenge: at that depth, the water pressure is nearly 350 times more than what we experience on land.
|