"Based on the analysis, researchers are also able to determine where in the sky the particle came from, its energy, and sometimes, what type of neutrino - electron, muon or tau - it was," said James Madson, executive director at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center. The sensors transform these signals from neutrino interactions - a handful an hour - into digital data that is then analyzed to determine whether they represent a local source (Earth's atmosphere) or a distant one. As neutrinos pass through the ice, they may interact with a proton or neutron, producing photons which then travel through the ice, and can be detected by a sensor. The block of ice at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica - up to a hundred thousand years-old and extremely clear - is instrumented with sensors between 1,450 and 2,450 meters below the surface. IceCube, because of the nature of neutrinos, can observe these particles' flights from any direction, and therefore act as a full-sky sentinel.
However, most observatories can only look at a small portion of the sky. Today, additional detection systems add to our view of the cosmos, including all sky surveys and gravitational wave detectors. Prior to 1987, with the explosion of Supernova 1987a, all extra-solar astronomical observations were photon-based. Neutrinos play an important part in this type of research. Multi-messenger astronomy describes an approach that combines observations of light, gravitational waves, and particles to understand some of the most extreme events in the Universe. IceCube reveals a slice of Universe we haven't yet observed."Īn Important New Tool in the Multi-Messenger Astronomy Toolbox It is absorbed or undergoes transformation that makes it hard to trace back to a source. "That's mostly because of distances and the age of the Universe. "20 percent of the potentially visible Universe is dark to us," Riedel explained. Importantly, scientists believed they could be critical clues to other phenomenon. Each colored circle shows an IceCube sensor that was triggered by the event red circles indicate sensors triggered earlier in time, and green-blue circles indicate sensors triggered later. But astrophysicists believed they were likely widespread and caused by a variety of cosmic events, if only they could be detected.Ī visualization of the Glashow event recorded by the IceCube detector. They were further found to be created by cosmic rays interacting with our atmosphere. They were first detected in the 1950s in experiments that operated near nuclear reactors, which also generate these particles. Neutrinos are neutral subatomic particles with a mass close to zero that can pass through solid materials at near the speed of light, rarely reacting with normal matter. "Antarctica ice is a great optical material and allows us to sense neutrinos as nowhere else." "Constructing a comparable observatory anywhere else would be astronomically expensive," Riedel explained. But speaking to Benedickt Riedel, global computing manager at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, it makes perfect sense.
The idea was so far-fetched it seemed like science fiction: create an observatory out of a one cubic kilometer block of ice in Antarctica to track ghostly particles called neutrinos that pass through the Earth.
An international group of scientists responsible for the scientific research makes up the IceCube Collaboration. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the first detector of its kind, designed to observe the cosmos from deep within the South Pole ice.
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