It's big news in China again!According to Xinhua News Agency, the mysterious underground laboratory built by China was officially put into operation. This laboratory has created many of the world's bests, and it is the largest underground laboratory in the world, and it is also the deepest underground laboratory in the world.
The laboratory is located at a depth of 2,400 meters in Jinping Mountain, Sichuan, and is jointly built by Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Beijing Normal University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other scientific research institutes, mainly used to detect various dark matter in the universe.
What is dark matter?Dark matter is the "ghost" of the universe, it cannot be seen or touched, but it constitutes 85% of the mass of the universe, and the various substances we can see actually occupy only a small part of the universe.
How was dark matter discovered?When scientists observe the movement of cosmic celestial bodies, they find that according to the law of gravitation, the motion of many celestial bodies cannot be explained at all, and it seems that there is a large amount of invisible matter around these celestial bodies, which affects the motion of these celestial bodies.
After further calculations, scientists were shocked to find that there are far more invisible substances than we can see, and it can even be said that the universe is mainly composed of these invisible matter. Scientists therefore refer to these invisible substances as "dark matter".
No one can say what dark matter is, it does not emit light and hardly interacts with anything other than gravitational pull, so it is difficult for humans to detect.
After a long period of research, scientists have discovered that neutrinos may be the legendary "dark matter". Neutrinos are a special type of particle that conforms to the characteristics of dark matter, does not emit light on its own, and has difficulty interacting with other matter.
Because neutrinos do not interact with other matter, these neutrinos can penetrate our bodies and even the Earth. According to research, our bodies are penetrated by 1,000 trillion neutrinos every second, but we don't feel anything.
Fortunately, neutrinos are not completely silent. One neutrino out of every 10 billion neutrinos is capable of reacting with hydrogen atoms to produce an extremely weak electromagnetic signal. By monitoring these weak signals, we can hopefully be able to detect these dark matter.
But the difficulty is that there are a large number of rays in the universe that shoot at the earth, and the earthlings themselves will also produce a large number of electromagnetic signals, which are much stronger than the signals of neutrinos. At this point, the neutrino signal is like a drop of water dropping into the ocean, and there is no way to distinguish it from it.
Scientists then came up with a good idea, neutrinos can penetrate the earth, but other rays cannot, as long as the detector is built deep underground, the earth can be used to filter out all kinds of miscellaneous cosmic rays.
That's why China is spending so much manpower and material resources to build huge laboratories at a depth of 2,400 meters underground. You know, this depth is equivalent to building an 800-storey super tower in the reverse underground, which is three times the tallest building in the Burj Khalifa.
The study of dark matter may seem to have no practical application value, but it can improve human understanding of the evolution of the universe, verify and improve physical theories, and promote the development of many disciplines such as cosmic physics and atomic physics. After all, when scientists discovered that the atom could be turned into a nuclear power plant for the benefit of mankind, no one thought that it could be turned into a nuclear power plant.
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