Over six weeks in June and July, 15 undergraduate and early graduate students from IceCube institutions, along with four visiting students, including an REU student, participated in the Cosmic-Ray Summer Program hosted this year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison). The students gained hands-on research experience, attended lectures by IceCube scientists, learned software tools and […]
Quiet time at the South Pole is good for any number of things—last week it was getting all the board games sorted and organized in the game room. Board games have proven to be a popular past time at the Pole. IceCube winterover Ilya was also out on the ice removing the covers on the […]
Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles that are able to travel unhindered through the cosmos. When a neutrino interacts with a molecule in the ice, blue light is emitted from the resulting secondary charged particles through a process called Cherenkov radiation. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole consists of an array of 5,160 optical […]
Last week was one of those relatively quiet weeks at the South Pole. IceCube’s winterovers gave a webcast presentation for a group of high school students in Australia. The whole station came together in celebration of Christmas in July, observed in many parts of the world, including the South Pole. But the quiet indoors was […]
IceCube-Gen2, the planned extension of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, was among nine projects selected for the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space’s (BMFTR) short list of the most important and promising research infrastructure projects. Federal Research Minister Dorothee Bär made the announcement earlier this month. The BMFTR is the German […]
The 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), the largest conference in the world for cosmic ray physics, was held on July 14-July 24 at the Geneva International Conference Center in Geneva, Switzerland. The main topics covered included cosmic-ray physics, gamma-ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy and neutrino physics, dark matter physics, solar and heliospheric physics, multimessenger astronomy, […]
What’s black and white and red all over? All the images from last week at the Pole. First of all, it’s winter, it’s dark, and the ground is covered in snow—there’s your black and white. The red? Well, the Dark Sector at the South Pole is home to many light-sensitive experiments, so in the dark […]
At the South Pole, there exists the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigaton-scale detector that detects tiny, nearly massless particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos can travel unhindered through space and, thus, can help uncover otherwise obscured parts of the universe. Many IceCube analyses study a diffuse neutrino flux—coming from all directions across the entire sky—that originate mostly […]
Blazars are active galactic nuclei (AGN)—supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies—that shoot out powerful jets of particles and light directed at Earth, making them some of the brightest objects in the universe. Because blazars can accelerate particles to extremely high energies, they are an attractive candidate as sources for high-energy neutrinos, the subject […]
Last week was mostly quiet again at the South Pole. The snow drifts continue to grow, as clearly seen in front of the IceCube Lab, above. From farther away, we see the snowed-in IceCube Upgrade hose reel and storage containers, under a bright moon (not sun!) through overcast skies. The activity for last week came […]