Explorations of a Life
Top 10 Extreme Observatories : Discovery Space : Discovery Channel
OMG, I want to go here! This shall be on my “when I visit Japan” to-do list.
“Whoa, there! A subterranean observatory? How is an astronomer supposed to study the stars when he or she is buried nearly a mile under a mountain in the Japanese Alps? Welcome to the world of neutrino astronomy — and the beautiful and bizarre observatory that scientists nicknamed “the glass cathedral.”
The Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) neutrino observatory looks like something from a 1970s space comic — even a “Moonraker” era James Bond wouldn’t kill someone inside this thing. It’s essentially a giant cylinder lined with 11,000 glass photomultiplier tubes and filled with 50,000 tons of crystal-clear water. Constructed in an abandoned zinc mine, the observatory resembles an artificial subterranean pond. Maintenance crews even take a small boat out to inspect the tubes.
The Super-K observatory exists because of something known as Cherenkov radiation, which is produced by charged particles and scattered by neutrinos in the water. The particles, zipping around even faster than the speed of light, emit a measurable glow, called Cherenkov radiation. The glass tubes lining the inside of the observatory detect this glow and the resulting information helps astronomers to, among other things, identify supernovae.”
