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IceCube Telescope Takes Shape Below Antarctic Ice
PabloSandoval48 writes "The world's largest telescope, currently under construction more than a mile beneath the Antarctic ice, is on schedule to be completed next year, according to a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, the lead institution for a scientific project called IceCube."
This is an observatory, but not a telescope. It's an omnidirectional particle detector, not pointed at some distant star.
You are taking about Baikal, it's a similar but on smaller scale. The Russians are hoping to join KM3NET in the future.
IceCube is a neutrino telescope which looks through the Earth to the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth basically acts as a filter removing potential background signals.
As someone working in this exact field I would say no. Where are you going to put it ? The idea of burying it deep in a refracting medium is to eliminate cosmic rays as background noise, and allowing the neutrino to produce a muon which will do a Cherenkov light in the detector. You need a deep refracting medium for this, beside we use the whole earth as a detector because of the low cross-section the neutrino have. So with a smaller stellar body(the moon) you will have less neutrinos interacting, and this less data to work with.
There's a deficit of muons, not neutrinos, from the moon's direction. Neutrinos pass through the moon easily.
Would there, however, be any benefit to having such a project set up under lunar regolith/base rock if we could ever get back to the moon?
Yes.
The reason why: there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays, and high-energy muons, one way or another, are the major cosmic-ray background in these experiments.
The reason why there are virtually no high-energy muons in lunar cosmic rays is due to their primary mechanism of production: on Earth, cosmic-ray protons smack into atoms at the top of the atmosphere, producing high energy pions, which decay into muons etc... and because of the low density of the atmosphere, the decay time is much less than the stopping time, so the muons have most of the orignal energy of the primary cosmic ray available to them.
On the Moon, which notably lacks an atmosphere, the primay cosmic rays smack into the lunar regolith and therefore the pions are created in a very dense medium, and lose most or all of their energy before decaying. The muons thus created are relatively low energy and stop within a few meters--as opposed to terrestrial cosmic ray muons which are still seen in experiments like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, 2 kilometres underground.
As such, a relatively small, relatively shallow detector on the Moon could produce comparable performance to the best terrestrial detectors, at only a few orders of magnitude higher cost.
It may be worth mentioning that no one working in the field ever calls a neutrino detector a "telescope", as in English that word when used without qualification virtually always means "optical telescope", so the usage in this article is misleading and confusing, to the point where if were done deliberately I would consider the person doing it to be either stupid or dishonest. I guess maybe the person who wrote the article or provided the information for it has English as a second language.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
But that's what it sees - the sensors point at the Earth and the filter software discards muon events that track from the sky, keeping events that come from underneath since muons coming from the Northern Hemisphere decay long before they can reach the detector. Neutrinos survive passing through thousands of miles of rock, so if it comes from the middle of the Earth, it's a neutrino. If it comes from the sky, it could be a neutrino, but chances are, it's a muon.