Lei Yang

Cosmic neutrinos are ghost particles, passing freely through the Earth. The IceCube telescope in the ice of Antarctica once caught such a neutrino, and it matched an infrared flare. That flare turned out to be the moment a black hole tore a star apart in a distant galaxy.

A huge pool of clear liquid is hidden deep underground. Inside, there is nothing but a pristine 'broth' that flashes with faint light when an invisible particle flies through. This is the JUNO detector—20,000 tons of liquid scintillator built to hunt for neutrinos. The main enemy of such a hunt is not darkness but its own noise.