Not everyone celebrates Christmas in July, but they do at the South Pole station, where traditions prevail. Last week started off the festivities with the appearance of a tree and presents in the galley. More activities and decorations are planned for upcoming weeks. The weather was nice and cold as a fitting complement to the […]
Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a horizon-to-horizon hazy band of stars. Now, for the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers. In an article to be published tomorrow, June 30, […]
For those who spend a year living at the South Pole, they are treated to glorious night skies in the winter season. Last week was a case in point, with displays of bright auroras, lots of stars, and glimpses of the Milky Way. Winterovers also get to experience a multitude of South Pole station traditions […]
Last week at the Pole it was all about the sky. There were days with perfectly clear skies and some of the brightest auroras of the season. If the photo above seems to suggest a little wizardry action behind the aurora, it might be a result of watching too much Harry Potter—the station organized a […]
It’s getting close to midwinter, when people in Antarctica, and other places, celebrate the southern winter solstice. In anticipation, South Pole station personnel took some group photos (above is one of them) to use as midwinter greeting cards, traditionally shared with other Antarctic stations. Last week at the Pole, IceCube’s winterovers spent a lot of […]
The tenth edition of the IceCube Masterclass hosted over 250 students across 20 research institutions in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. The masterclasses were held between the months of January and May, with many of them returning to an in-person program. This year, Queens University in Canada joined the […]
While most of us up north are enjoying longer and brighter days as summertime gears up, the South Pole remains settled in winter. The image above of frosted and snowed-in IceCube drill towers is a wintry scene indeed. Though, to be fair, the drill towers were rather snow covered in summer as well. (Here’s an […]
Last month, the IceCube Collaboration concluded their “IceCube – Neutrinos in Deep Ice” Kaggle competition that launched in January, 2023. Participants were challenged to devise a machine-learning solution that could quickly and accurately process a large number of events to identify the direction that neutrinos came from. Over the course of three months, 11,000 solutions […]
Some weeks are busier than others, and last week was one of them, at least as far as the IceCube detector goes. There were just a number of issues that seemed to arise one after the other, like hard drive errors and DOM warnings—nothing IceCube’s intrepid winterovers couldn’t handle. But if you’re going to be […]
