Super-Kamiokande

This is a picture of the sun, created by looking through earth.

It wasn’t made with light though. The image visualizes the flux of neutrinoscoming from the Sun. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles created in the nuclear furnace of the sun, and they can pass through nearly anything. Billions of neutrinos shoot through our bodies every second, and they fly with ease through the rocky bulk of the earth.

Scientists have built a giant neutrino observatory in an abandoned mine shaft 3,000 ft below Mount Kamioka in Japan (all that rock shelter the sensors from the noise of cosmic rays). It’s called the Super-Kamiokande - and it’s essentially a 13 million gallon tank of ultra-pure water, rigged with sensors that can detect the extremely weak interaction of neutrinos with other matter.

Work at Super-Kamiokande helped establish that neutrinos have mass. One of scientists on this project, Takaaki Kajita, has just won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Sun image: Robert Svoboda and K. Gordan, Super-K image: courtesy of Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institue for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo