| schema:text
| - False: Chinese observatory has not captured neutrinos, or ‘ghost particles’
An Oct. 22 video on Douyin claimed that China had successfully captured ten “ghost particles” at a facility located 700 meters underground.
The video was posted days after local media such as China Central Television (CCTV) reported about the underground facility, known as the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), located in Guangdong province.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that exist all around us and are one of the most abundant in the universe. Every second, 100 trillions of neutrinos pass from the sun through our body, but we cannot feel them, according to a Smithsonian Magazine article.
Space.com says neutrinos are called “ghost particles” because they barely interact with anything else. Scientists cannot use electric or magnetic forces to “capture” them.
A financial media outlet in China, Caijing.com, posted another video on Douyin about JUNO on Oct. 18 and claimed that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light and make time travel possible.
Other Douyin videos (here, here and here), posted between Oct. 19 and 27, even claimed that the alleged technological achievement meant “capturing ghosts” and likened it to China’s recent initiatives to search for extraterrestrial life and habitable planets.
These videos have over 123,000 likes and 330,000 shares as of this writing.
However, all of these claims are unsubstantiated.
The neutrino observatory was still under construction when the videos were circulating. Its operation is expected to begin next year. Also, physicists say neutrinos have not been proven to go faster than light.
CCTV videos
Some Douyin videos used CCTV footage about JUNO, such as a news report from May 28 and another from Oct. 11, giving the impression that the news came from the national broadcaster.
Annie Lab watched both newscasts and found neither CCTV report mentioned that JUNO had captured neutrinos or that neutrinos travelled faster than light.
The May 28 report was a feature story about the work of Wang Yifang, the lead scientist of JUNO and director of the Institute of High Energy Physics.
The Oct. 11 clip, part of a news segment about the completion of the acrylic sphere at the JUNO, explained the nature of neutrinos and the significance of the detection.
Neither news report mentioned that the scientists at JUNO “had successfully captured neutrinos.”
Chinese researchers and collaborating scientists from around the world will use JUNO to detect and study neutrinos emitted by two nearby Guangdong nuclear power plants, each located 53 kilometers away, for up to six years, AFP and Reuters news agencies reported in mid-October.
On Nov. 20, state-run media CCTV and China Daily said the facility’s core construction was completed. According to the facility’s official website, JUNO will begin operation in August 2025.
Not proven to travel ‘faster than light’
According to the website All Things Neutrino, run by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, neutrinos have not been proven to travel faster than light.
The misconception stems from a flawed experiment in 2011.
An article written by physicist Chad Orzel for the MIT Press Reader explains that the 2011 experiment reported that neutrinos sent from an accelerator outside Geneva, Switzerland, to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy appeared to arrive approximately 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected, suggesting that they traveled faster than light.
However, subsequent efforts to replicate this finding by various other experimental setups failed to support the claim. Later investigations revealed a faulty optical fiber cable that led to erroneous timing measurements. All measurements confirmed that neutrinos traveled at speeds very close to that of light in a vacuum, but did not exceed it.
The videos also claim that neutrinos can pass through any material without interaction. This assertion is false; scientists say that neutrinos “rarely” or “barely interact” with matter or other particles.
A video from Fermilab gives more explanation. Neutrinos do interact with matter — primarily through gravity and the weak nuclear force, though the lack of electric charge and tiny mass allow neutrinos to pass the vast gaps between the atomic nuclei of particles relatively easily.
Some Chinese content creators also made videos debunking false and misleading claims about neutrinos.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)