As with the previous week, last week’s weather at the Pole was a little cloudy, not the best for getting good glimpses of the one-and-only sunset (it will be a while before they see the sun again). Fortunately, there were a few moments when the skies cleared, and most of the crew took the opportunity […]
Long shadows are getting even longer. The sun hasn’t quite set completely at the Pole, but it’s very close. The weather last week was rather cloudy and windy. If it continues like that next week, the skies might be uncooperative for getting nice sunset photos. In the meantime, the images here were captured in a […]
IceCube’s winterovers started off last week with continued detector troubleshooting from the previous week. Later in the week, they joined a South Pole webcast and gave an outreach presentation on their experience as winterovers. They also took advantage of being outdoors for some emergency response training to trek out to the IceCube Lab and get […]
The search for the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is not a simple one. UHECRs, which are a mixture of protons and heavy nuclei, are the highest energy particles ever measured. They should produce “hotspots” of high-energy neutrinos if they interact with other particles near their point of origin. Six years ago, a first […]
Last week was somewhat busy at the South Pole for IceCube’s winterovers. There were a couple of troubleshooting issues regarding the detector, and a trip or two out to the IceCube Lab (ICL). That’s Moreno below checking the status of some fans on computers in the ICL. On the recreational side of things, the winterovers […]
Every six minutes, a neutrino flies through the Antarctic ice sheet, and close to an IceCube sensor—also called a DOM—it interacts with a molecule of ice and creates a tiny amount of light that triggers data-taking for an event in the IceCube neutrino detector. If this is a high-energy event, a beautiful track or a […]
It’s getting colder and colder at the South Pole. And when temperatures get too low, the winterovers can’t use snow vehicles to get around. But IceCube’s winterovers still had snow accumulation measurements to take last week, and the weather was not looking too favorable. Luckily, they did manage to find some open windows of opportunity […]
Seasons come and seasons go. At the South Pole, you get only two seasons, and last week the South Pole station closed for…winter! (Isn’t it always winter there?) The last two planes carrying away summer workers left the Pole last week. The remaining winterovers said their final good-byes and then set themselves to the tasks […]
X-ray binaries (XRB) consist of a compact object, such as a neutron star or a black hole, and a noncompact, companion star. When they are close enough, material is pulled off the star and drawn onto the compact companion, releasing intense X-rays that make them some of the most luminous sources in the sky. Microquasars, […]
Thomas K. Gaisser, the Martin A. Pomerantz Professor of Physics at the University of Delaware, passed away on Sunday, February 20, 2022, after a short illness. He was 81. Tom, as his friends and colleagues called him, was a pivotal researcher in the field of cosmic-ray physics. Since the late 1970s, he has inspired […]