And then there were four. Last week saw the arrival of IceCube’s two new winterovers, Kathrin and Benjamin, joining departing winterovers Raffaela and Johannes before they leave the Pole. On their first visit to the ICL, they set up a camera timer to capture a group photo. But the timer was a bit fast for getting back into their planned arrangement atop a giant snowdrift—so, antics ensued. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has measured the Sun’s cosmic-ray shadow for the first time, from data covering a period of five years. The results, submitted today to The Astrophysical Journal, show a clear but different shadow pattern every year. When looking at the yearly variation, scientists have found that the shadow pattern follows changes in the solar activity, which we know are correlated with the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field. Thus, this study opens a new line of research for the Antarctic neutrino observatory: the study of the Sun’s magnetic field using IceCube cosmic-ray data. […]
IceCube was quiet and well behaved last week, but the week was full of all sorts of other activity now that the summer season is officially underway. Here we see IceCube winterover Raffaela getting ready to help park the first passenger aircraft of the season. […]
Ok, so you’ve completed that giant 18,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, now what? Well, you might not want to take it apart again, at least not for a while. The folks at the South Pole decided to give theirs a place of honor on the wall in the B2 science lab. […]
Ignacio Taboada, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Georgia Tech and a longtime IceCuber, is one of the 2018 Fellows announced by the American Physical Society (APS) a few days ago. This award acknowledges his contributions to the study of transient sources of very high energy gamma rays and neutrinos with the HAWC and IceCube observatories. […]
Bad weather at the Pole last week kept the first flights from arriving, but it also meant lots of snow shoveling and fuel line testing to continue their readiness for incoming flights once conditions do improve. […]
Introduction IceCube has performed several all-sky searches for point-like sources of neutrinos that have been published elsewhere. This data release includes 3 years of track-like neutrino candidates detected by IceCube between June 2010 and May 2013. The selection includes through-going tracks, i.e. muon neutrino candidates that reach the detector from all directions, as well as […]
While they wait at the Pole for the first arriving flights of the season, there are still chores to do, like snow removal. The snowcat in this image is poised for action. […]
The main entrance to the South Pole station is known as Destination Alpha—this image shows a view out onto the frosty tundra from there at early sunrise. […]
The launch of the so-called IceCube Upgrade—which will deploy seven new strings at the bottom of the detector array—sets a milestone in what IceCubers have designed as an incremental extension of the Antarctic detector. […]