The Baikal neutrino telescope, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, will start operating in March 2021. This was announced on Monday, February 8, by Grigory Trubnikov, Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Trubnikov noted that with the help of the telescope, which is now being completed on Lake Baikal, Russian scientists plan to better understand the processes of the appearance and evolution of the Universe.
According to the academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the telescope is being built on the 106th km of the Circum-Baikal Railway. The developers intend to make Baikal the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.
"In fact, we will soon have another scientific installation of the megasiens class in our country, which will be an important contribution of JINR to the program of scientific megaprojects in Russia. The large-scale neutrino telescope "Baikal" should start working in March, and this will be one of the landmark events in the program of the Year of Science and Technology-2021, " he said in a conversation with TASS.
There are only a few neutrino telescopes in the world. Their task is to study the signals from high-energy neutrino particles that fall to Earth from the depths of galaxies when they appear or disappear. Experts believe that neutrinos carry invaluable information about objects and can shed light on the mystery of the origin of the universe.
In December 2020, a radio interferometer consisting of three telescopes was launched in Russia. Scientists of the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences have created a new system for determining the exact ground coordinates. With the help of the invention, it is possible to fix the unevenness of the Earth's rotation and the deviation of the planet's shape from the geometry of the ball.