Seasons come and seasons go. At the South Pole, you get only two seasons, and last week the South Pole station closed for…winter! (Isn’t it always winter there?) The last two planes carrying away summer workers left the Pole last week. The remaining winterovers said their final good-byes and then set themselves to the tasks […]
X-ray binaries (XRB) consist of a compact object, such as a neutron star or a black hole, and a noncompact, companion star. When they are close enough, material is pulled off the star and drawn onto the compact companion, releasing intense X-rays that make them some of the most luminous sources in the sky. Microquasars, […]
Thomas K. Gaisser, the Martin A. Pomerantz Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware, passed away on Sunday, February 20, 2022, after a short illness. He was 81. Tom, as his friends and colleagues called him, was a pivotal researcher in the field of cosmic-ray physics. Since the late 1970s, he has inspired […]
Last week was quiet for the IceCube detector but not so quiet for the South Pole station—lots of activity going on there. The third and final South Pole traverse of the season, SPOT3, arrived with its long load of fuel bladders, shown above and below, under a sun halo. SPOT3 was there just long enough […]
It took a solar eclipse and a balloon flying up to 5,300 meters to point to outer space as the origin of the ionizing radiation in the atmosphere. The discovery of cosmic rays was made by Victor Hess in 1912 and earned him the Nobel prize in 1936. Since then, scientists around the world use […]
Last week, after quite a few delays, the last 25 members of the South Pole winter crew arrived. It is not typical for half of the crew to arrive so late in the season, but international Covid precautions among other things have complicated the logistics of preparations and travel. The station will be closing soon […]
Last week some of the remaining 2021 winterovers departed the South Pole—the plane taking them away is shown above as it lifted off, with the IceCube Lab (ICL) in the background. While it’s still summer at the Pole and the sun is shining on many days, there’s no getting away from the cold and snow—those […]
Last week was fairly quiet at the Pole. The IceCube winterovers dealt with a few detector issues and handled some other maintenance tasks and cargo-related activities. They also gave a tour of the IceCube Lab to other individuals currently stationed at the South Pole (photo above) and continued with emergency response training (last week: frostbite!). […]
Last week was generally busy at the Pole. There were lots of tours happening around the station, and IceCube’s winterovers Moreno and Celas were both taking tours (SuperDARN and BICEP) and giving them at the IceCube Lab. As members of the medical emergency response team, they both participated in scheduled drills last week, too. And […]
Sun halos have been plentiful the last few weeks at the South Pole. Above we see IceCube winterover Moreno walking off in the distance under a large halo. He was headed toward the “End of the World”—it’s what they call the area that extends beyond the storage berms out on the ice. Although the snow […]