What caused the big bang? What happened to the material generated by it? These questions could be answered by work done in an underground laboratory to be built in Kaiping City.

A news conference was held in Jiangmen on Wednesday to announce that a neutrino observatory will be built 700 metres underground with an investment of 100 million yuan to help physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences study some of the biggest astronomical mysteries facing mankind, Guangzhou Daily reports. Wang Yifang of the academy’s Institute of High Energy Physics will be in charge of the project.

The observatory in Kaiping will be China’s largest underground laboratory and China’s second neutrino observatory. The other is one in nearby Daya Bay which gained international recognition in 2012 for “discovering a new neutrino oscillation model” and “opening a major door in the development of neutrino physics.”

The observatory in Daya Bay, via Google Images

Neutrinos are tiny and prolific subatomic particles that are born in nuclear reactions, including those that occur inside stars. According to the Nobel Prize website, 2001 to 2003 were the golden years of solar neutrino research. But research into neutrinos is still very much at the forefront of particle physics. An unprecedented neutrino discovery in the South Pole two months ago was described as a “Nobel Prize in the making.”

The location of the new observatory, underneath Jinji Town and Chishui Town took over a year to select. The laboratory will be completed in 2019 and the project will last at least 20 years. According to Wang Yifang, research done in the laboratory really could answer questions like “what happened to the material generated by the big bang?”