SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Here with another edition of Spacing Out...
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Yeah.
DETROW: Spacing Out, Spacing Out, Spacing Out.
...With our friends at Short Wave, Regina Barber and Ari Daniel. Hello. Did you like my space echo?
BARBER: I did. I did.
DETROW: What space news are we talking about today?
BARBER: OK, first up, we're shining a light on a long ignored particle for the theory of why the universe is made of matter.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: And then, Scott, we'll get into efforts by Ukrainian scientists to restore a telescope damaged by the war.
DETROW: So let's get into it. You have set me up with a high bar of...
BARBER: Oh no.
DETROW: ...Making relatable conversation about particle physics.
BARBER: I tried so hard. It's hard for me, too. I'm a physicist, but, like, particle physics has always been hard. The particle at the heart of this story is a hypothetical particle, one that might have affected all of matter in the universe at the very beginning of existence. It's a kind of neutrino.
DETROW: Let's just say, theoretically, I don't remember what a neutrino is.
BARBER: (Laughter) Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, theoretically, I have an answer. Neutrinos are extremely small, mysterious particles that don't really interact with anything. So they're incredibly difficult to catch and study. But we do know that they come in three flavors, and there are roughly 100 trillion of them passing through each of us every second.
DETROW: Wait, what?
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: That's crazy.
BARBER: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
DETROW: What do they have to do with the early universe?
BARBER: So when the universe was created over 13 billion years ago, matter and matters opposite, called antimatter, were thought to exist in equal amounts. But when matter and antimatter interact, they annihilate each other.
DETROW: So how do we get to the place where we are now, where you and I and the microphone and everything else are made of matter?
DANIEL: We don't have time to get into this in too much depth, but what you need to know is that there's this idea that at the start of the universe, neutrinos could have been created in three pairs, and each one of those pairs has a heavy right-handed neutrino and a lighter left-handed neutrino.
BARBER: Yeah, so some models account for matter overtaking antimatter by assuming that these, like, heavy right-handed neutrinos, they decayed over time, and they decayed into matter more than they decayed into antimatter. And this created this imbalance in the early universe. So they don't exist anymore. There are no right-handed neutrinos. But in this framework, historically, physicists have treated one of those right-handed neutrinos, those heavy ones, as irrelevant.
RISHAV ROSHAN: Generally, in the literature, this effect of third right-handed neutrono is ignored. But we found it to be very fascinating, and it was affecting so many things.
BARBER: So that's Rishav Roshan, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. He coauthored a recent study that suggested finally taking into account this last heavy right-handed neutrino would affect things. He and his co-author, Sudipta Show, at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, found that taking this into account makes the universe evolve slightly differently, suggesting that matter could have dominated the universe sooner than previously thought.
DETROW: I'm just like, there's a lot of big picture stuff to process, which is why I like talking about space...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...'Cause just, like, the scale of the conversation is mind-blowing.
BARBER: It's so big.
DETROW: And you have to move forward sometime.
BARBER: You do.
DETROW: So I'm going to try to do that. I've asked variations of this question before, but this is a hypothetical particle?
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: How do you do real world tests then?
DANIEL: Yeah, so we talked to Bryan Ramson, who's an experimental neutrino physicist at Fermilab, about this exact question. He didn't work on the paper, but he said you basically can't study it directly at all.
BRYAN RAMSON: Direct observation is so heavy that I do not know how you would produce it with the current technology. I don't even know how you would produce it with future technology.
BARBER: OK, hope is not lost, though. So Rishav thinks signatures of this heavy right-handed neutrino could be found indirectly one day by studying other cosmic phenomena, in one case, using a space observatory that will be going up soon, like in 2035.
DETROW: Interesting. I will bookmark to talk about that space observatory...
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...A little closer to then.
BARBER: More particle physics.
DETROW: In the meantime, let's talk about an observatory here on Earth, this radio telescope in Ukraine.
DANIEL: Yes, so it's called the Ukrainian T-shaped Radio Telescope, model 2
BARBER: UTR-2, for short.
DANIEL: That's right. And it's at the Institute of Radio Astronomy of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, where Viacheslav Zakharenko is the director.
VIACHESLAV ZAKHARENKO: It's the largest decameter radio telescope in the world.
DETROW: Is that decameter?
DANIEL: Yes, the decameter, which is 10 meters or about 33 feet. And that means that this telescope is capable of observing low frequency radio waves, the lowest of any large telescope. When it was built in the 1970s, it was the biggest of its kind.
BARBER: So astronomers use UTR-2 to study the bursts of radio waves that are emitted by certain planets like Jupiter and other celestial bodies.
DANIEL: The telescope was also able to detect lightning on Saturn. And when they pair it with radio telescopes elsewhere in Ukraine, they get an array the size of the country that can make higher resolution observations.
DETROW: I mean, that sounds so powerful.
BARBER: Yeah.
DETROW: But it seems, like so many other things in Ukraine, it's been damaged during the war?
DANIEL: Yes, heavily, Scott. The telescope is part of an observatory near the Russian border that's made up of a bunch of buildings. Viacheslav says that Russian forces occupied the area for more than six months at the start of the war in early 2022.
ZAKHARENKO: And practically all these buildings was seriously damaged, two fully destroyed. All computer were stolen.
BARBER: The radio antennas were largely untouched, fortunately, but there are these three underground tunnels, each one roughly half a mile long, and the northern one...
ZAKHARENKO: Our enemy use this tunnel for training.
BARBER: It's become a shooting gallery, says Viacheslav.
ZAKHARENKO: Like war base.
DANIEL: Plus, Viacheslav says there are still active mines. So even after the Russian forces left in the fall of 2022, it hasn't been safe for the researchers to return to work there.
DETROW: I mean, that's a complicated challenge. What have Viacheslav and his colleagues been doing in the meantime?
DANIEL: They've been plotting a massive upgrade of the telescope, actually, using what's happened as an opportunity to modernize the entire system.
ZAKHARENKO: We not need wait for end of war. We start now.
BARBER: So they can't do any of the installation until there's a ceasefire or some other type of agreement, but they can spec things out and build and test the components they need. It helps that the antennas are still in pretty good shape.
DETROW: What is the goal of this upgrade? What will it achieve?
DANIEL: Well, the researchers want to expand the radio wavelengths they're able to observe, which would allow them to, among other things, try to look for gas from the early universe. The updated telescope will also be able to a peer at different parts of the sky simultaneously. Plus, all of the equipment will be better shielded from the elements.
BARBER: Yeah, we spoke with Michel Tagger, who's a theorist astronomer, and he works at the French radio telescope called NenuFAR. He says that the Ukrainian telescope is important for the international astronomy community, too.
MICHEL TAGGER: Well, I hope they can rebuild the projects we had with them. And that means having an instrument they can have their hands on. And we hope to see it running again.
DANIEL: Viacheslav says that despite everything he and his colleagues have endured these last several years, he believes this upgrade is possible.
ZAKHARENKO: Look, I am an optimist. We need to build new telescope and install as end of this story.
DETROW: I love that resolution and optimism.
BARBER: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
BARBER: Me too.
DETROW: Thank you so much to both of you. That is Ari Daniel and Regina Barber of NPR's science podcast Short Wave. Thank you for another successful and enlightening Spacing Out.
BARBER: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for making this with me.
DANIEL: You're welcome, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOMMY GUERRERO'S "BY THE SEA AT THE END OF THE WORLD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
