Chasing secrets and techniques of the universe on world’s rooftop in SW China-Xinhua

CHENGDU, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) — On Haizi Mountain in Daocheng in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, with a mean altitude over 4,400 meters, a silent sentinel retains watch over the universe.

Spread throughout 1.36 sq. kilometers of historic glacial terrain, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) resembles an unlimited, intricate web, tirelessly capturing traces of cosmic rays, that are subatomic messengers from the depths of house.

This month, the formidable instrument in China’s southwest introduced a monumental discovery — it had captured essential observational proof that black holes, devouring materials from their companion stars and producing jets, act as highly effective particle accelerators and will play a key position within the manufacturing of high-energy cosmic rays within the Milky Way.

Not distant, the place the Bang River winds previous Daocheng, one other large stirs. The world’s largest round array of telescopes tracks the solar with quiet precision. The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope, notably, is important for efforts aimed toward bettering the accuracy of house climate forecasts.

Situated on the southeastern fringe of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, Daocheng county in Sichuan’s Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture has a mean altitude of about 3,750 meters.

Blessed with distinctive atmospheric situations — skinny, secure air and minimal gentle air pollution — this distant county, which is dwelling to simply 30,000 individuals, is quickly turning into a powerhouse of China’s deep-space exploration endeavors.

COSMIC GAZES

Amid the stark magnificence of those highlands, a rising neighborhood of scientists is gathering, utilizing monumental devices to push the boundaries of human data.

In deep autumn this 12 months, a biting wind carried flurries of snow throughout Daocheng. At an altitude of 4,411 meters, the world’s highest civilian airport welcomed a well-known determine — Cao Zhen, researcher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the LHAASO.

Since its development started in 2016, Cao has routinely flown to this high-altitude outpost. His job this time — to examine progress on a monitoring system.

“When we first came here for site selection in the autumn of 2014, we encountered a wolf, just sitting on a ridge,” recalled Cao, his eyes nonetheless gleaming with the reminiscence of these pioneering days. “We slept in tents at night — listening to wolves howling nearby.”

It is on this unforgiving, oxygen-thin terrain that Chinese scientists have carved out a frontier for cosmic ray analysis.

Invisible to the attention, cosmic rays are streams of high-energy particles from outer house. Along with electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves, they’re one among three key “messengers” for observing the universe.

Yet, a century after their discovery, their origins and acceleration mechanisms stay one among astrophysics’ nice unsolved mysteries. Answering this query requires a detector of unprecedented energy and the LHAASO was conceived for this very objective.

From above, the LHAASO appears like an enormous circle. Its large “net” integrates practically 10,000 detectors. At its coronary heart are three huge, sealed water ponds designed to seize the faint flashes of sunshine created when cosmic rays collide with atmospheric molecules.

Nearby, 18 “blue boxes” home wide-field Cherenkov telescopes. Scattered round them like sesame seeds on a flatbread are 5,216 electromagnetic particle detectors and 1,188 muon detectors — forming a floor array that identifies gamma-ray photons.

This web remains to be increasing. Workers, bundled towards the chilly, could possibly be seen assembling a extra highly effective monitoring system that includes new Cherenkov telescopes. Eventually, 32 such telescopes shall be added.

“It’s like giving the LHAASO hawk eyes — improving its spatial resolution by over fivefold,” defined Cao. “It will allow us to see more clearly.”

An hour’s drive from the LHAASO, nestled in a grassy basin close to Daocheng, lies the photo voltaic telescope array. Its 313 six-meter antennas, organized in an ideal kilometer-wide ring, pivot in unison like a area of steel sunflowers, all targeted on a central calibration tower.

Solar eruptions emit radio waves that attain Earth in simply eight minutes, whereas high-energy particles take for much longer. “This time difference allows us to provide forecasts and warnings,” mentioned Yan Jingye, chief designer of this array.

“When the sun ‘sneezes,’ the Earth’s space weather can ‘catch a cold,’ potentially disrupting satellites and communications,” Yan defined.

In September 2023, the array efficiently predicted a photo voltaic storm’s arrival time with an error stage of lower than 1.16 hours. This facility additionally uncovered a uncommon long-period pulsar that would find yourself rewriting how remoted slow-spinning neutron stars are born — and tracked a radio coronal mass ejection that raced outward for 5 full photo voltaic radii earlier than fading.

Daocheng’s distinctive benefits — excessive altitude, flat terrain, relative accessibility and robust native help, are attracting extra large science services.

On a close-by 4,700-meter peak, development of a 2.5-meter-wide-field photo voltaic telescope is underway. This telescope is about to turn into the world’s largest axisymmetric photo voltaic telescope upon completion in round 2026.

“This place is becoming a true frontier for deep-space exploration in China — a hotbed for science,” mentioned Cao.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

The LHAASO’s most spectacular second up to now got here on October 9, 2022, with the detection of the brightest gamma-ray burst in recorded historical past, an occasion ensuing from a dying star 2 billion light-years away.

While different international detectors have been successfully “blinded” by the depth, the LHAASO was the one ground-based instrument to seize your entire occasion — accumulating over 60,000 gamma-ray photons.

“The LHAASO is revolutionising our understanding of the Galaxy, challenging traditional theories of the origin of cosmic rays,” mentioned Elena Amato, an Italian astrophysicist.

The discovery, reported afterward within the journal Science, listed international co-authors from Ireland’s Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Thailand’s Mahidol University and Russia’s Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Since its inception, the LHAASO has developed into a worldwide scientific platform open to the worldwide analysis neighborhood. In 2025 alone, it hosted two collaboration conferences with the participation of worldwide analysis institutes.

France, Russia, Thailand and Pakistan are presently worldwide companions of the LHAASO. This is a microcosm of China’s rising management in worldwide large science tasks. ■