It was all about the sun last week at the Pole. Weather conditions allowed the winterovers to glimpse the green flash as the sun finally set below the horizon. IceCube winterover Martin was in the right place at the right time to capture a photograph of it, above (and it wasn’t his first time). The […]
Since 2013, the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) has hosted afterschool internships at least once a year to provide high school students in the Madison area the opportunity to work on real-world physics experiments. Through the internship, participating students have been able to meet working astrophysicists, learn computer-programming skills, and contribute to data analysis […]
Darren Grant has seen quite a few exciting things during his time as IceCube spokesperson. From pinpointing a cosmic accelerator to measuring a tau neutrino appearance to detecting a Glashow resonance event, the last four years have been exciting for the South Pole neutrino telescope and the team of scientists behind it. But Grant, a […]
When the IceCube Neutrino Observatory sees a high-energy neutrino from outer space, IceCube researchers want to know where it came from. The unconventional “telescope” uses a three-dimensional grid of supersensitive light sensors buried under the ice at the South Pole to detect signals from these tiny, nearly massless fundamental particles, which rarely interact and can […]
IceCube was stable last week, but the same can’t be said for the weather at the Pole. They had high winds and mostly conditions of low visibility from blowing snow. But there were a few brief moments where things cleared, and the sun was visible on the horizon. The low sun highlights the texture of […]
Today is the final day of IceCube’s spring 2021 collaboration meeting. For the third time, the semi-annual meeting was held virtually due to the pandemic. With 338 registered participants, it is likely the most attended IceCube collaboration meeting ever. Every weekday for the last two weeks, IceCube collaborators from around the world tuned into Zoom […]
Last week was relatively quiet at the Pole. IceCube’s winterovers performed a few detector maintenance tasks and gave a tour of the ICL to South Pole logistics personnel. Although winter is fast approaching and the sun is quite low, there is still plenty of daylight for taking outdoor photos. Above we see the tour group […]
The sun is getting noticeably lower in the sky at the South Pole. IceCube’s winterovers also note that it’s starting to get cold. Apparently, there’s “cold” and then there’s “South Pole cold.” Last week, the winterovers were busy outdoors, taking advantage of the lingering light to complete a round of IceTop snow measurements. They also […]
On December 8, 2016,* a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of […]
On December 8, 2016, IceCube saw a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960. With this detection, scientists provided another confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics. It also further demonstrated the ability of IceCube, which detects nearly massless particles called neutrinos using thousands of sensors embedded […]