THE STARS

The origin of the chemical elements (the atoms of which the universe is composed) was finally revealed in detail by these three astronomers and one nuclear physicist in 1957. Left to right, Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, Willie Fowler, and Fred Hoyle.




Gamow, von Weizsacker and Bethe (1937 - 39)


Hans Bethe (1906 - 2005)




Ray Davis (1914 - 2006), Nobel Prize 2002

John Bahcall (1934 - 2005)


The earliest neutrino telescopes used 37Cl nuclei, which captured neutrinos to yield 37Ar, or 71Ga nuclei, which captured neutrinos to yield 71Ge. It was soon realized that to get a suitably enormous detecting volume, you should just use very pure water, and look for the Cherenkov radiation due to neutrino-electron elastic scattering. (Antineutrinos can also be detected, by νe-bar + p → n + e+.) Interest in such studies was sparked tremendously in the 1970s when the early ongoing experiment by Davis detected only 1/3 the predicted number of solar neutrinos.  [Since it takes around 40,000 years for a photon to make its way from the sun's core to the surface, it was thought possible that the sun had gone out!]  The discrepancy was, of course, due to neutrino oscillations, which sparked interest even more.  Today, a large number of newer and larger neutrino telescopes are constantly being planned, constructed and put into service.  The large number of astrophysical sources of neutrinos (such as supernovae) make data from such telescopes extremely important in astrophysics.



Underwater neutrino telescopes:
Baikal (1993 on)
ANTARES (2006 on)
Super Kamiokande III (2006 on)
KM3NeT (future telescope; under construction since 2013)
NESTOR Project (under development since 1998)
TRIDENT (2030), at bottom of Pacific Ocean



Under-ice neutrino telescopes:
AMANDA (1996–2009, superseded by IceCube)
IceCube (2004 on)
DeepCore and PINGU, an existing extension and a proposed extension of IceCube.



Underground neutrino telescopes:
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (closed 2006)
Soudan Lab, in Soudan, Minnesota
Sanford Underground Research Facility

The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), buried in the ice beneath the South Pole, ultimately became part of the IceCube observatory. IceCube, which was completed in 2010, consists of a cubic kilometer grid of sensors embedded below 4,900 feet (1,500 m) of ice. In Europe, researchers are developing plans for KM3NeT, which will span 1.2 cubic miles (five cubic kilometers) in the Mediterranean Sea. And physicists at the Baikal Neutrino Telescope in Russia's Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world, are planning to build the Gigaton Volume Detector (GVD), which would be one cubic km.

Summary of Neutrino Telescopes Worldwide










Catalog of Exoplanets

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