IceCube’s new winterovers, Benjamin and Kathrin, are now fending for themselves as they said goodbye last week to Johannes and Raffaela, who finally left the Pole after some delays. (Thanks, guys!) […]
Week 46 at the Pole
News
A view of the Milky Way with IceCube and ANTARES
Neutrinos allow us to test our models at higher energies than do gamma rays. In a first-time effort to combine IceCube and ANTARES data to constrain galactic cosmic-ray models, scientists from both collaborations have set new limits on some of these models as well as a new limit for the galactic contribution to the IceCube neutrino flux. These results have been published this week in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. […]
Steady point sources of cosmic neutrinos remain unresolved
In a new attempt to lay siege to the steady sources of neutrinos, the IceCube Collaboration has improved the search for sources in the Northern Hemisphere using muon neutrino data. The new search with eight years of IceCube data and an upgraded event selection and reconstruction resulted in enhanced sensitivity and the most stringent limits yet on emission from steady sources. These results have just been submitted to the journal European Physical Journal C . […]
Week 45 at the Pole
Last week began with cold, beautiful weather. The sun was out when all four winterovers set off in a pisten bully to visit all the IceTop stations. These trips are part of the regular task of measuring snow accumulation at the stations. Looks like they were having a good time. […]
Multimessenger searches for sources of gravitational waves and neutrinos
The IceCube, LIGO, Virgo, and ANTARES collaborations have used data from the first observing period of Advanced LIGO and from the two neutrino detectors to search for coincident neutrino and gravitational wave emission from transient sources. Scientists did not find any significant coincidence. The results, recently submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, set a constraint on the density of these sources. […]
Week 44 at the Pole
And then there were four. Last week saw the arrival of IceCube’s two new winterovers, Kathrin and Benjamin, joining departing winterovers Raffaela and Johannes before they leave the Pole. On their first visit to the ICL, they set up a camera timer to capture a group photo. But the timer was a bit fast for getting back into their planned arrangement atop a giant snowdrift—so, antics ensued. […]
The Sun also casts a shadow on IceCube
The IceCube Collaboration has measured the Sun’s cosmic-ray shadow for the first time, from data covering a period of five years. The results, submitted today to The Astrophysical Journal, show a clear but different shadow pattern every year. When looking at the yearly variation, scientists have found that the shadow pattern follows changes in the solar activity, which we know are correlated with the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field. Thus, this study opens a new line of research for the Antarctic neutrino observatory: the study of the Sun’s magnetic field using IceCube cosmic-ray data. […]
Week 43 at the Pole
IceCube was quiet and well behaved last week, but the week was full of all sorts of other activity now that the summer season is officially underway. Here we see IceCube winterover Raffaela getting ready to help park the first passenger aircraft of the season. […]
Week 42 at the Pole
Ok, so you’ve completed that giant 18,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, now what? Well, you might not want to take it apart again, at least not for a while. The folks at the South Pole decided to give theirs a place of honor on the wall in the B2 science lab. […]
Ignacio Taboada named APS Fellow for his work in multimessenger astrophysics
Ignacio Taboada, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Georgia Tech and a longtime IceCuber, is one of the 2018 Fellows announced by the American Physical Society (APS) a few days ago. This award acknowledges his contributions to the study of transient sources of very high energy gamma rays and neutrinos with the HAWC and IceCube observatories. […]