Studium Generale | Let's Ask | Fishing for Neutrinos in the Deep Sea

At a depth of 3.5 kilometers in the Mediterranean Sea, Dutch scientists are constructing a massive neutrino detector called KM3NeT spanning one cubic kilometer. Recently KM3NeT detected an extraordinarily high-energy neutrino originating from outer space. Neutrinos are fundamental particles often referred to as "ghost particles" because they rarely interact with other matter. The energy of this cosmic neutrino was significantly greater than that of any neutrino previously detected on Earth. Is this a groundbreaking discovery? Moreover, what do we hope to learn from studying neutrinos? And why are scientists putting a telescope on the bottom of the ocean in the first place?