Last month, more than 230 participants took part in the fall IceCube Collaboration meeting at the Memorial Union in Madison, Wisconsin. Hosted by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison), the fall meeting takes place in Madison every two years. Before the meeting began, collaborators held pre-meetings focused on the […]
Meet Lydia, a Basler plane refueling at the South Pole on its way to McMurdo. Lydia had made a stop at the Pole in the winter on its way to another station for a medical transport. Here, the welcoming crew took time for a group photo, above. That’s Lydia, below, during refueling. Flights to the […]
Let’s raise a glass! Of hot water, that is. Thrown into an arc overhead, a spray of hot water in very cold air temperatures quickly transforms into a spray of tiny ice crystals, often referenced as the Mpemba effect. You don’t need to be at the South Pole to try this, just very cold ambient […]
There was plenty of detector maintenance and troubleshooting last week to keep IceCube’s winterovers busy. The detector doesn’t know about all the Nobel hoopla, so…it just keeps doing its thing. There was a hard drive that needed to be replaced, and a few software updates to do. On the Upgrade side of things, calibration operations […]
Last week, there were cakes here, there, and everywhere, including at the South Pole. Upon learning that IceCube PI Francis Halzen had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the entire station gathered at the IceCube Lab for a celebratory group photo. Later, the kitchen staff presented a special cake decorated for the occasion (even […]
Depending on which way you face, it can still seem a little dark at the Pole. In the image above, the sun is bright but it leaves the foreground dark and shadowy. Below, we still see surface shadows that show off all the intricate designs left in the snow from the winds, but the entire […]
Today in Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube, “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Francis proposed and proved that ice could be used as a detection […]
There it is! The sun, that is—a thin sliver on the horizon, but orange and bright and lighting up the sky above it. It’s of course a welcome sight after a long polar night. (Ok, there won’t be auroras for a while, but we can handle that.) Last week kept IceCube’s winterovers busy with one […]
The center of our galaxy offers a unique window into how cosmic rays are accelerated to extremely high energies. This region contains a large amount of dense gas and potential accelerators, including a supermassive black hole. Of particular interest to scientists are particles that can be accelerated to petaelectronvolt (PeV) energies, roughly 100 times higher […]
Images from last week at the Pole don’t quite show the sun as up and visible, but it’s very close. And there’s plenty of light to show off an expanse of sastrugi, above, with a flag line fading into the distance. Last week was busy with detector activities as well as seasonal station activities. At […]