Washington, Dec 23 : A new under sea telescope that will be the second largest structure ever built after the Great Wall of China, is currently under development.

The KM3net telescope planned for the sea bed under the Mediterranean will be a network of detectors with a volume of several cubic kilometres, built to detect neutrinos - tiny, fast-moving particles that pass straight through water and even solid rock.

"Any time you detect a particle, what you're always doing is having the particle interact with some kind of matter, whether it's water, steel, air or ice," the Daily Mail quoted Peter Fisher, a particle physicist at MIT, as saying.

"The less the particle interacts, the more material you need for it to interact in," he stated.

The seawater in between the 900m KM3Net detectors will work as giant optical `detector' - looking for `flashes' caused by neutrinos hitting water atoms.

Majority of the neutrinos will pass straight through, but the few that do collide with atoms will be picked up by the huge telescope.

The detector's discoveries may facilitate research in dark matter and high energy physics.

The construction of telescope, in which each detector is taller than the 830m Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, could start as early as next year.

"The Mediterranean Sea is ideal for these huge structures - thanks to water of excellent optical properties at the right depth and excellent shore-baseddata processing," said the KM3Net organisation.

"The KM3NeT neutrino telescope will be unique in the world in its physics sensitivity and will provide access to scientific data that will propel research in different fields, including astronomy, dark matter searches, cosmic ray and high energy physics," the organisation added. (ANI)