Week 29 at the Pole

The auroras tell you it’s winter at the South Pole—you can’t see auroras there during the summer because the sun is out the whole time. But in winter, the folks who station at the South Pole get to witness these auroras in all their glory. […]

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Week 28 at the Pole

It looks as if the smoke stacks are releasing a plume of green smoke along with their stream of exhaust, but it’s just an artifact of the camera angle. The green splash across the sky reminds us that it’s still aurora season at the South Pole. […]

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Week 27 at the Pole

Winter is long at the South Pole, at least when measured by the last plane out and the first plane back in. That’s roughly eight to nine months with no one (and no things) coming or going, quite a long period of isolation for the 40 or so winterovers at the station. You need a large store of provisions to cover the crew’s needs during that time. […]

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Week 25 at the Pole

Since bundling up to go outdoors is a bit of an ordeal, you don’t want to have to make unnecessary trips out to the ICL if you can avoid it. But there were a few of those unavoidable trips for the IceCube winterovers this past week. One was to replace a modem because of problems with an Iridium link. […]

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Multimessenger search for cosmic sources by initial LIGO-Virgo and IceCube

In a joint analysis by the IceCube, LIGO and Virgo collaborations to be submitted to the journal Physical Review D, researchers aimed to identify GW events and high-energy neutrinos that could originate from the same astrophysical source and to determine their joint significance. No significant coincident events were found, but the search allowed researchers to derive upper limits on the rate of joint sources for a range of source emission parameters. […]

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Week 24 at the Pole

Last week we mentioned that they were celebrating midwinter at the South Pole, but we didn’t really cover all the festivities. First, there was the traditional viewing of “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror movie about an off-season caretaker in an isolated (also cold and white) location. […]

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A search for dark matter in the galactic halo

The quest for galactic halo dark matter includes high-energy neutrino searches that might be produced by the self-annihilation of dark matter particles in our galaxy. If this is the case, IceCube should observe a characteristic anisotropy in the neutrino flux due to the additional dark-matter induced neutrinos. So far, the IceCube Collaboration has not found any significant deviation from the background expectation, following new results that have been submitted today to The European Physical Journal C. […]

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