Such astronomers look skyward in the optical and infrared realm of the electromagnetic spectrum. But there are other astronomers on the Big Island that will look not skyward, but earthward, for evidence of astronomical events. The neutrino is one of the half dozen or so fundamental, stable particles of the universe. That neutrinos can burrow through most matter, including most of the earth, without interaction, is what makes neutrino astronomy so intriguing. The notion of neutrino astronomy was born over 30 years ago when it was surmised that neutrinos were produced in the thermonuclear blast furnaces of stars, in the cataclysmic formation of supernovae, and as relics of the Big Bang.
WIMPs are a hypothetical solution to the missing matter problem.
Another proposed source is superconducting cosmic strings, which is a sort of residual cosmic defect that resulted from the Big Bang. The tank held 10,000 cubic meters of water and was surrounded by 2,000 PMTs. The detector was used to detect supernova neutrinos in the energy range of 10-50 Mev. The supernova was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 50 kiloparsec away. A detector in Kamioka, Japan, also saw a half dozen events, thus giving credence that it was a cosmic event rather than a local anomaly.