Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles that are able to travel unhindered through the cosmos. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, searches for neutrinos and captures them at different energies. By measuring the entire spectrum of astrophysical neutrinos, scientists can gain insights into the origin and acceleration mechanisms of highly […]
Over the years, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole has collected an abundant amount of muons and neutrinos produced in the Earth’s atmosphere. These neutrinos are produced when high-energy particles called cosmic rays collide with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere and produce “air showers” that rain down on Earth. Previous studies showed that […]
When a muon neutrino crashes into the ice, it sometimes produces a hadronic shower and a muon, which are then detected by one of the 5,000 sensors of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This hadronic shower carries a fraction of the energy of the original neutrino. This fraction is described by a parameter known as inelasticity. […]
Ever since high-energy astrophysical neutrinos were first observed in 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole has continued searching for their elusive sources. Thus far, evidence of high-energy neutrino emission has been found from the blazar TXS 0506+056, the active galaxy NGC 1068, and most recently, the Milky Way. Still, neutrino emission from […]
Neutrinos are tiny, nearly massless particles that traverse long distances across the universe, interacting with matter only through the weak force. During their journey through the atmosphere and Earth, they can transform, or “oscillate” from one “flavor”—electron, muon, and tau—to another. This phenomenon has led scientists to conclude that neutrinos have nonzero masses, but despite […]
Neutrinos are chargeless, weakly interacting particles that are able to travel undeflected through the cosmos. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole searches for the sources of these astrophysical neutrinos in order to understand the origin of high-energy particles called cosmic rays and, therefore, how the universe works. IceCube has already shown that neutrinos […]
Cosmic rays are extremely energetic charged particles that zoom through space and bombard the Earth’s atmosphere. Since cosmic rays get diverted by magnetic fields on their way to Earth, tracing their origins is more difficult. However, tiny, nearly massless particles called neutrinos, and photons at similar energies, can be used to trace cosmic rays back […]
Since high-energy astrophysical neutrinos were first observed in 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole has continued searching for their elusive sources. So far, evidence of high-energy neutrino emission has been found from the blazar TXS 0506+056, the active galaxy NGC 1068, and most recently, the Milky Way. Still, neutrino emission from these […]
The nature of dark matter—roughly 85% of all matter in the universe—is one of the most important unresolved questions in modern physics. Thus far, no experiment has been able to determine what dark matter is made of. A possible candidate for dark matter are the hypothesized weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which hardly interact with […]
Extremely energetic charged particles called cosmic rays are accelerated by violent cosmic objects before raining down on Earth from all directions. Protons and heavier nuclei make up these cosmic rays, which can then collide with other particles in the atmosphere to produce secondary particles that cascade into so-called “air showers.” For more than a century, […]