The sky just gets brighter and brighter along the horizon. And although auroras are exciting, the dawn sky with its changing colors holds its own special appeal. […]
Week 36 at the Pole
Testing a new technique to search for neutrino point-source populations
The IceCube Collaboration performed a search for point-source populations using a technique called the non-Poissonian template fit (NPTF) and published their findings in a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. This was the first time the NPTF was used on IceCube neutrino data, and while they did not find any neutrino point-source populations, they proved the technique’s viability. […]
Week 35 at the Pole
The sky is beginning to take on different colors at the Pole, depending on which direction you’re looking. There’s a hazy band of orange along the horizon, but facing away toward the station the sky appears blue. […]
Week 34 at the Pole
It was a quiet week at the Pole. And with some bad weather, it was a good time to roam around and take some indoor photos. […]
How to deal with “dust” in the Antarctic ice
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is an array of over 5,000 optical sensors embedded in a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. Optical impurities in the ice affect how light travels through the IceCube detector and thus how the neutrino interactions appear. In a technical paper submitted to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the IceCube Collaboration presents a new method to understand the optical properties of the ice, called the SnowStorm method. […]
Bayesian posterior for IceCube 7-year point-source search with neutrino-count statistics
Introduction The presence of a population of point sources in a dataset modifies the underlying neutrino-count statistics from the Poisson distribution. This deviation can be exactly quantified using the non-Poissonian template fitting technique, and in this work we present the first application of this approach to the IceCube high-energy neutrino dataset. Using this method, we […]
IceCube looks for extremely energetic gamma rays from the Milky Way
While the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is mostly known for detecting neutrinos, it is also the experiment most sensitive to PeV-scale gamma rays in the Southern Hemisphere. In a recent paper by the IceCube Collaboration submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, they discuss the results of a recent search for PeV gamma rays. No evidence of PeV gamma rays were found, but they established the most stringent constraints on PeV gamma-ray emission to date. […]
Week 33 at the Pole
It’s a slow sunrise at the South Pole, with light creeping up from the horizon little by little each day. But even as the twilight approaches and the sky brightens, it’s still dark enough to discern some auroras here and there. […]
Week 32 at the Pole
Sometimes the moon is so bright at the Pole that it lights up the dark winter skies. The moon was setting last week, and as it left there was a slow transition to the first visible signs of sunlight along the horizon. […]
Week 31 at the Pole
The auroras were still out in full force last week, as if lingering in their farewell before twilight steps up. […]