"I've seen people faint here," warns physicist He Huihai as he deplanes at Daocheng Yading Airport, the world's highest at 4411 meters above sea level. Many of his colleagues at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing take a day to acclimate before resuming work on the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), an ambitious new observatory here on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Although troublesome for humans, the thin air is exactly what makes Tibet good for observing the staggeringly energetic photons that crash into Earth from unidentified objects across the universe. After 3 years of construction, LHAASO is nearly finished and begins observations on 26 April.
LHAASO is just the first in a batch of observatories taking shape across the Tibetan Plateau, which might one day rival the high, dry, Atacama Desert in Chile as a home for premier observatories. IHEP's Ali CMB Polarization Telescope (AliCPT), under construction in the plateau's west, will start its hunt for signs of primordial gravitational waves next year. This year, the National Space Science Center will begin to build the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT), which will study the sun's violent outbursts. And the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) in Beijing is studying sites on the northwestern rim of the plateau for a 12-meter Large Optical-Infrared Telescope (LOT), larger than any existing telescope.
For more details, please refer to Science Magazine.
An observatory for detecting cosmic rays was built in mountains of the eastern part of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at an average altitude of 4,410 meters. LHAASO consists of 5,216 electromagnetic particle detectors and 1,188 Muon detectors covering an area of 1.36 square kilome...
Based on the observations of China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), one of the country's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities, Chinese scientists have measured the brightness of the standard candle in high-energy astronomy. T...
86-10-68597521 (day)
86-10-68597289 (night)
86-10-68511095 (day)
86-10-68512458 (night)
cas_en@cas.cn
52 Sanlihe Rd., Xicheng District,
Beijing, China (100864)
Copyright © 2002 - Chinese Academy of Sciences
