News From the New Millennium II

Robots are building a telescope under the sea to search for invisible particles from the center of the Galaxy.

Just being able to type that sentence makes me glad to be alive right now.  And it's all true. 

The Antares neutrino telescope, developed by a consortium of European science institutes, is taking shape on the bottom of the Mediterranean near Toulon, France.  The reason they're building it way down there is simple:  it's dark.  In the total blackness of the seafloor, sensitive photocells can detect the very faint luminosity produced by neutrinos interacting with other matter.  Neutrinos are so immaterial that they can penetrate thousands of kilometers of solid matter without being affected at all.  This means Antares can actually look through the Earth at distant neutrino sources. 

In earlier posts I've mentioned that the Universe of visible matter that we can sense is just a small fraction of the vast dark world beyond our senses.  Neutrino telescopes like Antares give us one window into that dark world.