{"id":728162,"date":"2026-06-10T19:51:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T19:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/728162\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T19:51:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T19:51:11","slug":"an-underground-detector-in-china-unveils-its-first-major-findings-about-mysterious-ghost-particles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/728162\/","title":{"rendered":"An underground detector in China unveils its first major findings about mysterious ghost particles"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A massive underground detector aimed at understanding the mysterious ghost particles<\/a> in our universe released its first major results on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory<\/a> in China started collecting data in August with the goal of understanding neutrinos<\/a>: tiny cosmic particles that date back to the Big Bang and whiz harmlessly through our bodies<\/a> by the trillions every second. Yet they weigh almost nothing, making them difficult to sniff out.<\/p>\n

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, the JUNO team unveiled its initial findings from two months of data collection \u2014 including some of the most precise measurements to date of how neutrinos switch between three varieties, or flavors, as they zip through space.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really makes me look forward to more exciting results in the future,\u201d said physicist Kate Scholberg with Duke University, who had no role in the new research.<\/p>\n

The spherical JUNO detector is located 2,297 feet (700 meters) underground. It examines antineutrinos that come from collisions inside two nearby nuclear power plants. Antineutrinos are equally mysterious, opposite versions of neutrinos that scientists can study to understand their behavior and how neutrinos work.<\/p>\n

When the antineutrinos meet particles within the detector, they produce a flash of light.<\/p>\n

Scientists are hoping the detector will help resolve the longstanding mystery of how heavy each neutrino flavor is. They think two are similar in weight and that the third is an oddball, but they aren’t sure whether two are heavy and the other is light or vice versa.<\/p>\n

The initial results haven’t answered that question just yet, but they show what the detector is capable of \u2014 and that it \u201cwill be able to test the finer ripples\u201d that separate the neutrino flavors and their masses, said study co-author Liangjian Wen, a member of the JUNO collaboration.<\/p>\n

Two similar neutrino detectors \u2014 Japan\u2019s Hyper-Kamiokande and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment based in the United States \u2014 are set to begin data collection within the next decade, cross-checking the China detector\u2019s results using different approaches.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A massive underground detector aimed at understanding the mysterious ghost particles in our universe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":728163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,95,192967,27247,10321,135681,66,262557],"class_list":["post-728162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-china","tag-cosmic-particles","tag-data-collection","tag-juno","tag-neutrino-observatory","tag-science","tag-underground-detector"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}