On October 9th, 2022, an unusually bright pulse of high-energy radiation whizzed past Earth, captivating astronomers around the world. The luminous emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB), one of the most powerful classes of explosions in the universe. Named GRB 221009A, it triggered detectors at NASA’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor and Large Area Telescope (both on […]
Atmospheric muons and neutrinos are the most abundant signals detected in IceCube. They are produced in cosmic-ray-induced air showers in the Earth’s atmosphere. Cosmic rays are high-energy protons and heavier nuclei traveling through space. When these cosmic rays reach Earth and collide with atoms in the atmosphere, they create an avalanche-like cascade of secondary particles […]
White dwarfs are very dense, compact objects that are one of the possibilities for the final evolutionary state of stars. If they happen to be in a binary system with another companion star, the white dwarf may pull material from the companion star onto its surface. In this case, if enough material is accumulated, a […]
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer-sized neutrino telescope, searches for high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Located at the geographic South Pole, IceCube consists of 5,160 digital optical modules (DOMs) across 86 vertical cables (strings) embedded deep within the Antarctic ice, as well as a surface array, IceTop, and a denser inner subdetector, DeepCore. When neutrinos […]
The IceCube Collaboration has reported two candidate events for the final unobserved Standard Model cosmic messenger: astrophysical tau neutrinos. And one of these neutrino events, as with previous prominent particles detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, has been given its own nickname. Double Double, an event with a high probability of being produced by a […]
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a one-of-a-kind detector operating at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, searches for neutrinos—tiny, ghost-like particles that can travel extremely long distances unperturbed. Of particular interest to IceCube are astrophysical neutrinos, high-energy neutrinos originating from beyond our galaxy. Because they can travel straight distances, they can be traced back to their sources. […]
The origin of high-energy cosmic rays remains a long-standing mystery in particle astrophysics. However, it is thought that they are accelerated by galactic sources called PeVatrons, capable of accelerating particles to energies greater than 1 PeV. Some candidate galactic PeVatrons include pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe)—a type of nebula generated by strong winds of charged particles […]
Machine learning (ML) has proven to be an invaluable tool for data analysis, including the field of particle physics. Now, ML techniques are being employed to analyze data collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer array of optical sensors buried in Antarctic ice that detect neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that act as cosmic messengers. […]
For the first time, an international team of scientists have found evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, also known as Messier 77, an active galaxy in the constellation Cetus and one of the most familiar and well-studied galaxies to date. First spotted in 1780, this galaxy, located 47 million light-years away from us, […]
Back in 2013, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory—a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector embedded in Antarctic ice—announced the first observation of high-energy (above 100 TeV) neutrinos originating from outside our solar system, spawning a new age in astronomy. Four years later, on September 22, 2017, a high-energy neutrino event was detected coincident with a gamma-ray flare from a […]