A livestreamed look at the inner workings of the Stawell Underground Physics Lab, SUPL, doubled as an educational opportunity for students at Stawell Secondary College earlier this month.

Broadcast live as part of a webinar titled ‘Beyond the Stars – Astronomy Across the Globe’, the tour saw two of the school’s teachers join SUPL facility manager Kim Mintern-Lane, California Institute of Technology researcher Brandon Rodriguez, Caribbean Institute of Astronomy’s Isa Mohammed and ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics education outreach manager Jackie Bondell.

Ms Bondell said the event represented a chance for researchers to share more information about the facility with a curious public.

“The public has been very interested in learning about SUPL,” she said.

“It has a growing profile, especially in the Stawell region, and people are very aware of it, but it’s obviously a place that’s very hard to access for the general public.

“I thought it would be worth doing a livestream event from there. Other labs that have restricted access, such as some of the underground caverns at CERN, in Switzerland, do the same thing.”

SUPL is located one kilometre underground in a former part of Stawell Gold Mine, and is one of two underground particle physics laboratories in the southern hemisphere.

It was established to help researchers study dark matter – a theoretical form of matter that does not interact with light or electromagnetic radiation.

SUPL was built deep underground in order to shield it from cosmic radiation that could affect experimental results. Ms Bondell said the livestream was designed to engage students.

“We wanted to create an educational event to tie in astronomy themes from around the world, bringing unique perspectives and addressing things like why we have a lab a kilometre underground when we’re trying to learn about space,” she said.

“We planned the livestream at a time when it would be available to US teachers and students as well as Australian teachers and students.

“The livestream included a presentation about the various types of telescopes we use to learn about the universe … a bit of a background on what dark matter is and some of the science behind the detector that’s going into SUPL and … a tour that included both the outside of the lab in the mining tunnels and the inside of SUPL.

“Isa gave a talk about cultural astronomy because we felt it was often a piece that is not discussed when you’re talking about the science of astronomy.

“Cultures all over the world have been using the sky for their own timekeeping, harvesting, storytelling and more for thousands of years.”

Ms Bondell said more than 260 people from eight countries tuned in to the livestream, the majority of them students.

She said later this year she would travel to the US to work further with Mr Rodriguez on developing educational opportunities through the lab.

“We’ll be taking some of these activities that we’ve developed in order to work with regional schools in Australia and look at how we can work on scaling those to a broader US audience and how we can assess the impact of them,” she said.

“It’s part of a bigger project to pull together what’s happening in various areas of physics and astronomy research around the world to find common themes and look at how we use our connections to broaden its impact.”

A recording of the livestream will be made available on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics’ YouTube channel in the coming weeks.

People can visit www.youtube.com/@arccentreofexcellenceforda8154 to view the recording and other videos from the centre.

More information is available at www.centredarkmatter.org.

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