Revealing Space Secrets 2400m Underground... China Launches World's Largest Underground Laboratory

Operation Begins at Jinping Mountain Ultra-Deep Laboratory in Sichuan Province
Size of 120 Swimming Pools... "Providing an Ultra-Clean Research Environment"

The world's largest underground research facility built by China has begun operations. The facility was constructed 2,400 meters underground to explore dark matter, one of the greatest mysteries in modern space science.

On the 8th, Hong Kong Ming Pao, citing China's state-run Xinhua News Agency, reported that the world's largest ultra-deep laboratory, the "China Jinping Underground Laboratory," located 2,400 meters underground in Jinping Mountain, Sichuan Province, covering an area of 330,000 square meters, started operations the day before.

The Jinping Underground Laboratory was initially constructed with an area of 4,000 square meters during the first phase of construction in 2010. Subsequently, in December 2020, a second phase expansion began in collaboration with Tsinghua University and others, and was completed in three years.

Entrance of the world's largest underground laboratory in Sichuan Province, China [Image source=Yonhap News]

Until now, the largest underground experimental space was the Gran Sasso National Laboratory operated by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). The Jinping Underground Laboratory is twice the size of Gran Sasso, which is 1,400 meters deep and 18,000 square meters wide, equivalent to the size of 120 Olympic swimming pools.

The laboratory is accessible by car through tunnels and provides a special and quiet experimental environment not available elsewhere. According to the laboratory, it creates an "ultra-clean" environment ideal for dark matter detection by effectively blocking most cosmic rays.

Professor Wei Chen of Tsinghua University said, "The Jinping Laboratory is exposed to an extremely small amount of cosmic rays, equivalent to one hundred millionth of those on the Earth's surface, providing an ultra-clean space for dark matter research."

He added, "The extremely low levels of environmental radiation and naturally occurring radioactive gas radon inside the laboratory can also enhance dark matter detection. We can embark on the most important scientific inquiries."

Launch scene of the Euclid Space Telescope developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for dark matter exploration [Image source=Yonhap News]

The primary goal of the Jinping Laboratory is the exploration and study of dark matter, whose true nature remains unknown to humanity. Dark matter is a concept introduced to explain gravitational phenomena in the universe that cannot be accounted for by observable matter, constituting 26.8% of the total matter in the universe. It cannot be observed through electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, or gamma rays, and its existence is recognized only through gravity.

Visible matter accounts for only 5% of the total mass of the universe, with the remaining 95% estimated by scientists to be dark matter and dark energy. Scientists believe that identifying the nature of dark matter will play a crucial role in understanding the origin, evolution, composition principles of the universe, and the fundamentals of natural phenomena.

For this reason, dark matter has recently emerged as a key research topic in the natural sciences, with significant investments and research being actively conducted worldwide. In July, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Euclid Space Telescope, developed over more than a decade with a budget of 1.4 billion euros (approximately 2 trillion won), to explore dark matter.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.