Exploring tiny celestial fragments with radio receivers buried within Greenland's icy expanse
The Radio Neutrino Observatory Greenland (RNO-G) is a groundbreaking project that aims to listen for extremely elusive particles from space. Installation of equipment for this observatory will continue until mid-August, despite the logistical challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic.
Neutrinos, ultralight elementary particles that hardly ever react with matter, can pass through walls, the Earth, and even entire stars. This makes them ideal for looking inside exploding stars or merging neutron stars. The advantage of using radio waves in RNO-G is that ice is fairly transparent to them, allowing for the detection of radio signals over distances of several kilometres.
RNO-G will be the first large-scale radio neutrino detector, with plans to install 35 antenna stations, each 1.25 kilometres apart, around Summit Station. The individual stations can operate autonomously, powered by solar panels, and will be connected with each other via a wireless network.
The first antenna stations for RNO-G have already been installed at the Summit Station research facility in Greenland. This pioneering project will remain on the Greenland ice sheet for at least five years.
From the Sun alone, some 60 billion neutrinos pass completely unnoticed through a speck on Earth the size of a fingernail every second. RNO-G relies on a new method of detecting very high-energy cosmic neutrinos using radio antennas.
DESY, a member of the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific association, is involved in the planning and construction of RNO-G. DESY is one of the world's leading particle accelerator centers, investigating the structure and function of matter. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) provides 90% of DESY's funding, with the remaining 10% coming from the German federal states of Hamburg and Brandenburg.
More than a dozen partners are involved in the RNO-G project, including the University of Chicago, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Penn State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and DESY. IceCube's grid of optical detectors registers neutrinos with energies up to about a quadrillion electron volts, but radio antennas are planned to be added to the IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole as part of its Generation 2 expansion (IceCube-Gen2).
RNO-G will be sensitive to energies from about ten quadrillion to a hundred quintillion electron volts, expanding our understanding of the universe and its most elusive particles. The installation process during the pandemic has been a logistical challenge, with teams quarantining at various locations before arriving at Summit Station. Despite these challenges, the installation of RNO-G continues, marking an important step forward in our understanding of the cosmos.
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