In summer at the South Pole, the traditional place for photo ops is the ceremonial Pole, where a mirrored sphere is mounted on a post and surrounded by a semicircular lineup of flags. But in the dark of winter, any place is as good as another as long as you have a nice aurora as backdrop […]
The IceCube Collaboration is now accumulating more statistics in the search for the sources of very high energy neutrinos, but also to learn more about their nature. In a new study, submitted this week to the Astrophysical Journal, the collaboration reports a substantially improved observation of the diffuse muon neutrino flux in the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data with about a tenfold increase in statistics. Once more, a clear astrophysical contribution has been found, which at the highest energies excludes a purely atmospheric origin at the 5.6 sigma level. Also, the accuracy of the measurement of the spectral properties has been improved.
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The sky was not disappointing anyone last week at the Pole; it had it all—stars, Milky Way, and auroras. Work-wise it was rather quiet for IceCube’s winterovers. But they had other activities going on, including emergency response training and showcasing their LEGO creations in a blog post for LEGO fans. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has made public today that a new search for cosmogenic neutrinos resulted in two very high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos, which are found to be of astrophysical origin with a 92.3% probability, include the highest energy neutrino detected to date. While of astrophysical origin, the energy of these neutrinos does not match the expectation for a cosmogenic neutrino flux. The lack of evidence for such events in a search of seven years of IceCube data places very strong constraints on the sources of UHECR. Proton-dominated sources are greatly disfavored, and testing mixed and heavy nuclei cosmic-ray sources will require much bigger instruments, such as an extension of IceCube or radio Askaryan neutrino detectors. These results have been submitted yesterday to Physical Review Letters. […]
The IceCube Collaboration presents results from a search for sources of high-energy neutrons using four years of data from IceTop, the surface detector array. Researchers have not found any evidence for astrophysical neutrons, but the results have allowed the collaboration to set new limits that constrain the possible galactic neutron sources. These results have just been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. […]
The Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU) is the proposed infill extension in a region at the center of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that will lower the energy threshold to a few GeV, dramatically increasing both the number of GeV-scale neutrinos detected by IceCube and, more importantly, the precision with which they are measured. […]
South Pole, dead of winter, no sun for months. So, that rules out a rainbow in the above image. Instead it’s an aurora, but it was doing its best, with its graceful arch, to imitate a rainbow. […]
IceCube researchers are once more joining the longstanding biennial Neutrino conference. The 27th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, Neutrino 2016, started on Monday in London, England, and runs through Saturday, July 9. […]
It’s the middle of winter at the South Pole, and not only is it dark outside, but there are restrictions in place to keep it as dark as possible (exterior lights limited to a red spectrum, to reduce interference) for the benefit of research projects that rely on the dark night sky. […]
Last week, they were observing midwinter at the South Pole station, which traditionally includes a fancy dinner and a viewing of “The Shining.” […]