Introduction Neutrino observations are a unique probe of the universe’s highest energy phenomena: neutrinos are able to escape from dense environments that photons cannot and are unambiguous tracers of hadronic interaction processes, in particular the acceleration of cosmic rays. As cosmic ray protons and nuclei are accelerated, they interact with gas and background light to […]
Week 45 at the Pole
Outgoing winterovers Felipe Pedreros (left) and Blaise Kuo Tiong (right) greet newcomer Ian Rees (center) on his arrival. Thanks to Felipe and Blaise for a great year of photos and reports, and welcome to Ian and Dag (Larsen, still to come), fresh and ready to capture the year’s adventure ahead. […]
Week 44 at the Pole
It always seems as if they have just about everything at the South Pole, but apparently they didn’t have a unicycle. Until recently. Winter is officially over, and new arrivals to the station have come bearing goodies of all sorts, from “freshies” to toys—like this unicycle, which IceCube winterover Blaise is testing out in good form. […]
Week 43 at the Pole
Life’s a tradeoff. At the South Pole, when winter comes to a close, you trade cold, dark, isolated for (still) cold, but bright, and less isolated. With the sun out, you also get sundogs—scientific name, parhelion. The tradeoff there? No more auroras for a while. […]
Week 42 at the Pole
A few short weeks ago this scene would have looked quite different. But now the sun is out, full force, and the snow is bright white. The camera was apparently caught in a stare down with a Basler ski-plane that was stranded for a few days at the Pole due to bad weather. […]
Extremely high-energy neutrinos in IceCube: where do they come from?
The IceCube collaboration presents new results that rule out the possibility—at a confidence level greater than 90%—that the two PeV events detected in IceCube are cosmogenic neutrinos. However, the long exposure of the analyzed data, from May 2010 to May 2012, and the lack of detected events with higher energies, have allowed a new probe into the cosmogenic neutrino flux, which has been used to set the most stringent limit for the energy range from 1 PeV to 10 EeV. This analysis has just been submitted to the journal Physical Review D. […]
Week 41 at the Pole
Greenery, and flowers, … this doesn’t look like much like the South Pole. But this photo was taken at an important place in the South Pole station—the greenhouse. If it weren’t for the greenhouse, they wouldn’t have any fresh vegetables during the long winter. […]
Week 40 at the Pole
What do a rock, an egg, and a kiwi all have in common? They can all be found at the South Pole. Maybe not readily or easily, but they were all found at the South Pole recently. This rock was discovered outside on a snowdrift, a finding that spurred some scientific tests to examine the nature of the rock. […]
Week 39 at the Pole
Now that looks like the sun—finally! It’s rising up over the flags at the ceremonial South Pole. […]
Week 38 at the Pole
The sun is rising at the Pole, but this once-a-year occurrence is a much more gradual happening than the once-a-day occurrence most of us experience (or don’t, if we sleep through it, as the case may be). Here, increasing sunlight lets you clearly see the flag path leading to the Dark Sector. […]