Last week, with the IceCube detector behaving well, winterovers Benjamin and Kathrin had a bit more time for extracurriculars. They enjoyed a live webcast with a classroom in Italy and tried their hand at mastering the unicycle. […]
Tradition is strong at the South Pole, and last week was validation of that. After the final plane departed with the remaining summer personnel, the winterovering station crew all gathered in the gym for the traditional screening of all three versions of “The Thing.” They engage in this marathon viewing each year. […]
In a new paper by the IceCube Collaboration, physicists use the inner and denser DeepCore detector within IceCube to try to answer this question. A weak preference is shown for NO, a result that is complementary to and in agreement with results from other experiments. This paper has been submitted to the European Physical Journal. […]
In a recent paper by the IceCube Collaboration, two new techniques have improved searches at energies from 100 TeV down to 100 GeV. When tested with a few years of IceCube data, these new selections improve the sensitivity and discovery potential, for the first time allowing the search for galactic point-like sources using track events created by muon neutrinos, which in many cases are indistinguishable from atmospheric muon tracks. These results have just been submitted to the journal Astroparticle Physics . […]
Time flies, even at the South Pole. The winterover staff are getting ready for the pending station close—here IceCube winterover Kathrin is parking one of the last Hercs to have landed for awhile. […]
IceCube winterovers Benjamin and Kathrin are showing off a thermometer reading from last week, when temperatures in Madison, WI, and many other midwestern areas were colder than at the Pole. […]
In a recent publication submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, the IceCube Collaboration and Pan-STARRS1 scientists have searched for counterpart transient optical emission associated with IceCube high-energy neutrino alerts. When following five alerts sent during 2016-17, researchers found one supernova worth studying, SN PS16cgx. However, a more detailed analysis showed that it is most likely a Type Ia supernova, i.e., the result of a white dwarf explosion, which is not expected to produce neutrinos. […]
Flight delays are not uncommon at the South Pole, which can be frustrating. But sometimes there’s an upside, as there was for a recent cohort of IceCube personnel waiting to leave the Pole. They were rewarded for their delay with a flight out on a Basler aircraft (much smaller than the Herc they were waiting on), which gave them fantastic views on the way to McMurdo Station. […]
In a new paper by the IceCube Collaboration in partnership with scientists from the Fermi-LAT collaboration and the ASAS-SN telescopes, researchers went back to eight years of archived IceCube.
The results of this long-term search of high-energy neutrino emission from blazars confirm that this type of active galaxy cannot account for the majority of the diffuse neutrino flux seen by IceCube and that the source of most of the high-energy neutrinos is still unknown. These results have recently been submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics. […]
Even though the end of the summer season feels like it’s fast approaching, things have still been busy at the South Pole. Work got underway for both the new surface radio antennas and the new IceAct telescopes. […]