It was a pretty busy time last week at the Pole. IceCube’s winterovers had some unrelated hardware incidents that required troubleshooting and fixing, and a trip out to the IceCube Lab. And look what a great photo winterover Raffaela captured on that trip, with the ICL backlit by a full moon. […]
Stefan Westerhoff, a professor in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, passed away on Sunday, August 5, 2018, after a long illness. He was 50. […]
Last week the weather was a bit mixed, and the winterovers had their lunar eclipse viewing marred by blowing snow. Regardless, they still got together outdoors for a group photo. […]
In a new search for neutrino sources, the IceCube Collaboration and other collaborators have looked for short-lived transient sources, including gamma-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae, or neutron star mergers. The search, which looked for two or more neutrinos detected within 100 seconds from the same location, included transients that might not emit gamma rays and might be pointing to uncharted objects in the universe. The results submitted this week to Physical Review Letters did not identify any individual source but did show that the number of bright short-lived transient neutrino sources must be small or they must be fairly faint. […]
So much ice, yet it’s no mean feat to keep a stable water supply for the folks at the South Pole. Housed in the shack shown in this image is a rodwell, which is how they get their water. Hot water is sent down a hole to a cavity deep in the ice, and a continuous flow of water is maintained to prevent the rodwell from freezing. […]
There were two bingos last week at the Pole: (1) the game, where some improvising was required for the tiles, and (2) the exclamation, which was well warranted for IceCube’s recent multimessenger results. […]
A new measurement of the IceCube Collaboration has put Lorentz symmetry to the test and found—yet again—that neutrinos behave as expected. The results, published in Nature Physics, are the most stringent limits to date in the neutrino sector on the existence of a Lorentz violating field. […]
Last week at the Pole, the weather was perfect for starting out the second half of winter—cold but calm conditions, with some of the prettiest auroras. […]
Introduction A high-energy neutrino event alert was issued by IceCube on 22 September 2017 and was found coincident in direction and time with a gamma-ray flare from the blazar TXS 0506+056. As part of the analysis of this multi-messenger signal, all previous neutrinos that issued alerts within the realtime alert system (DOI:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2017.05.002), or would have […]
Introduction A high-energy neutrino event detected by IceCube on 22 September 2017 was coincident in direction and time with a gamma-ray flare from the blazar TXS 0506+056. The analysis of this association was reported in Science (DOI:10.1126/science.aat1378). Prompted by this association, IceCube investigated 9.5 years of data recorded in the direction of this blazar to […]