Seeing the sub-atomic world

Neutrinos can be very hard to detect, so much so that Neil deGrasse Tyson dubbed them "the most elusive prey in the cosmos." In this video, he explains that the detection chamber is buried deep within the earth to stop other particles from getting in.

"Matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino," he says. "A neutrino could pass through a hundred light-years of steel without even slowing down."

But why catch them at all?

"If there's a supernova, a star that collapses into itself and turns into a black hole," Dr Yoshi Uchida of Imperial College London told Business Insider. "If that happens in our galaxy, something like Super-K is one of the very few objects that can see the neutrinos from it."

Before a star starts to collapse it shoots out neutrinos, so Super-K acts as a sort of early-warning system, telling us when to look out for these dazzling cosmic events.