Interesting - I hadn't heard of this until I saw it on Lubos' blog

http://km3net.org/home.php

KM3NeT, an European deep-sea research infrastructure, will host a neutrino telescope with a volume of several cubic kilometres at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea that will open a new window on the Universe.

The telescope will search for neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources like gamma ray bursts, supernovae or colliding stars and will be a powerful tool in the search for dark matter in the Universe.

An array of thousands of optical sensors will detect the faint light in the deep sea from charged particles originating from collisions of the neutrinos and the Earth.

Interesting, thank you.

I guess this sort of spacial resolution is useful? The site indicates a resolution of 0.1 degree, or 360 arcseconds. The human eye resolves 60 arcseconds, and the Hubble telescope 0.05 arcseconds, according to Hubble site.


Presumably this greatly enhances the current sources, by for example, allowing rapid identification of new neutrino sources?

Made of Stars wrote:Interesting, thank you.

I guess this sort of spacial resolution is useful? The site indicates a resolution of 0.1 degree, or 360 arcseconds. The human eye resolves 60 arcseconds, and the Hubble telescope 0.05 arcseconds, according to Hubble site.

Presumably this greatly enhances the current sources, by for example, allowing rapid identification of new neutrino sources?

Yes I suppose you're right. I think it would be too much to ask for super-duper angular resolution with neutrinos, but identification of sources would be very interesting.

I think there was something about NESTOR one of the predecesors to this neutrino telescope, located in the same place, on TV recently (I can't for the life of me remember which programme) and IIRC in the time it had been operational it had detected no neutrinos at all. One hopes that this new incarnation has better success.

SN 1987A was detected by K II and a couple of other neutrino detectors but as far as I know they had no angular resolution at all. The SN detection being inferred on the basis of timing versus optical detection. A tenth of a degree angular resolution is actually damn good for neutrino detection. The resolution chart posted earlier in the thread shows the effect of the Earth's atmosphere on optical resolution with the Hale Telescope only being three times better than Galileo's little scope. Ground based scopes can now do better that the HST via adaptive optics, although that only works for a very narrow field.