Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope

Beneath the ice of Lake Baikal, the world's deepest and oldest freshwater lake, a vast array of light sensors makes up the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope - an instrument built to detect ghostly particles called neutrinos rather than starlight.

About the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope

Operated by Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) together with the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences and other partners, the telescope has studied neutrinos passing through Lake Baikal since 2003, building on an original detector first installed in 1990 and completed in 1998. Rather than capturing light through a lens, it senses the faint flashes produced when neutrinos interact with water deep below the lake's surface.

History

The array was substantially upgraded starting in 2005, and again from 2015 as part of the Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD) project, which deployed its first cluster of 192 light sensors on eight long strings in April 2015 and expanded it further the following year. Baikal-GVD is now considered the largest neutrino observatory in the Northern Hemisphere.

Telescopes & research

The telescope's strings of photodetectors hang at depths of several hundred metres, tuned to catch both local atmospheric neutrinos created by cosmic rays and rarer cosmic neutrinos that can point back toward distant high-energy astrophysical events.

Location & getting there

The detector sits beneath the surface of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, Russia - an enormous, ancient freshwater lake surrounded by mountains and remote taiga.

Visiting

The telescope itself is a submerged scientific instrument and not a site visitors can tour, but Lake Baikal above it is a well-known travel destination in its own right; anyone interested in the science should check the Baikal-GVD project's website for outreach information.

See your named star from here

Baikal-GVD is built to detect neutrinos rather than visible starlight, so it isn't the place to spot a named star. But the region's clear Siberian skies, far from city lights, are a genuinely good place to try - bring the coordinates of your named star from the Star Register catalogue to a local observatory or stargazing spot and ask for help finding it.