IceCube winterovers Benjamin and Kathrin are showing off a thermometer reading from last week, when temperatures in Madison, WI, and many other midwestern areas were colder than at the Pole. […]
Week 4 at the Pole
Pan-STARRS1 far vision at the service of neutrino sources
In a recent publication submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, the IceCube Collaboration and Pan-STARRS1 scientists have searched for counterpart transient optical emission associated with IceCube high-energy neutrino alerts. When following five alerts sent during 2016-17, researchers found one supernova worth studying, SN PS16cgx. However, a more detailed analysis showed that it is most likely a Type Ia supernova, i.e., the result of a white dwarf explosion, which is not expected to produce neutrinos. […]
Week 3 at the Pole
Flight delays are not uncommon at the South Pole, which can be frustrating. But sometimes there’s an upside, as there was for a recent cohort of IceCube personnel waiting to leave the Pole. They were rewarded for their delay with a flight out on a Basler aircraft (much smaller than the Herc they were waiting on), which gave them fantastic views on the way to McMurdo Station. […]
Learning from blazars, a long-term neutrino–gamma-ray partnership
In a new paper by the IceCube Collaboration in partnership with scientists from the Fermi-LAT collaboration and the ASAS-SN telescopes, researchers went back to eight years of archived IceCube.
The results of this long-term search of high-energy neutrino emission from blazars confirm that this type of active galaxy cannot account for the majority of the diffuse neutrino flux seen by IceCube and that the source of most of the high-energy neutrinos is still unknown. These results have recently been submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics. […]
Week 2 at the Pole
Even though the end of the summer season feels like it’s fast approaching, things have still been busy at the South Pole. Work got underway for both the new surface radio antennas and the new IceAct telescopes. […]
Week 1 at the Pole
There were different groups of South Pole visitors last week—some human, and some not. The nonhuman visitor came from Japan—IceCube-san, seen here on the snow outside the IceCube Lab. The other visitors were adventure travelers, who were based at a campsite not far from the station. […]
Atmospheric tau neutrino appearance in IceCube
The IceCube Collaboration has just performed its first measurement of tau neutrino appearance in oscillations of atmospheric muon neutrinos, which excluded the absence of tau neutrino oscillations at a significance of 3.2σ, confirming previous observations by OPERA and Super-Kamiokande. These results have just been submitted to the journal Physical Review D. […]
Week 53 at the Pole
Last week at the Pole started in 2018 but ended in 2019. What better way to launch into the new year than by unveiling something shiny and bright? That’s the tradition at the South Pole, with a special ceremony held each January 1 to reset the marker at the geographic South Pole. […]
Week 52 at the Pole
There are so many different ways to celebrate the holidays around the world, but there’s only one special event that actually takes you around the world. It’s the occasion of the annual “Race Around the World” at the South Pole—a fun run that circles around the South Pole, traversing all of the world’s time zones. […]
Week 51 at the Pole
The second South Pole Overland Traverse (SPOT) arrived and toured the IceCube Lab last week. Defueling the SPOT bladders can be a rough job, especially if the weather’s bad. […]