Up, up, and away. That’s a NOAA balloon launch shown in a time-lapse photo—pretty nice! Last week at the Pole was all about the camera. […]
Week 37 at the Pole
Week 36 at the Pole
A new temperature record for 2016 was set at the Pole last week—a low of –107.9 °F. The extremely cold temperatures didn’t stop one station inhabitant from climbing the outdoor staircase is short sleeves. […]
Searching for point-like sources with seven years of IceCube data
The IceCube Collaboration has just announced the results of a search for point-like sources using track-like neutrino candidates detected by IceCube over seven years, from 2008 to 2015. No source has been identified, but the sensitivity keeps improving at a fast pace and will allow IceCube to test accurate models that suggest that sources could soon be observed. These results have just been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. […]
Week 35 at the Pole
One unique aspect of living at the Pole for a year is experiencing only one sunset, at the equinox in March, and only one sunrise, which occurs in September, while you’re there. Since the sun rises just once during the whole year, it’s kind of a big deal. It’s also a slow process, with daylight increasing little by little as the sun’s arrival nears. […]
Week 34 at the Pole
Despite the encroaching twilight, this photo of a Scott tent near the South Pole marker also captured some faint auroras. Auroras have been caught in many shapes and forms, conjuring up cinnamon rolls and question marks, but in this case, it’s a grumpy face. At least, once it has been suggested, it’s difficult not to see it. […]
Searching for dark matter in the Earth
The IceCube Collaboration has expanded dark matter studies with a search for annihilations in the center of the Earth. Researchers have used one year of data—May 2011 to May 2012—and have not found an excess of neutrinos above the expected background. The results have set new limits on the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth that are an order of magnitude stronger than previous results by AMANDA and that also improve the IceCube spin-independent cross section limits for a WIMP mass of 50 GeV. This study has just been submitted to The European Physical Journal C. […]
Week 33 at the Pole
A full moon is doing just as good a job as the sun in lighting up the sky. Here the moon, surrounded by a clear halo, is shown hiding behind one of the frosty towers of the ICL. A large snow drift looms in the foreground. […]
Exploring the possibility of detecting extragalactic supernovae with IceCube-Gen2, summer research with IceCube
Growing up on a small, secluded hobby farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the night sky played a major role in my upbringing. Since there is almost no light pollution, the night sky was always bright and clear. In the summer months, my bedtime was determined by the time a specific satellite went over the house. Every year, my family would gather up all the blankets in the house and lay outside to watch meteor showers for hours. From a young age, I loved the idea of learning more about the stars and planets, and as I got into high school, I fell in love with physics. My original plan was to become a high school physics teacher, and I found the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) not only has a fantastic physics program but is also involved with IceCube. I had heard about IceCube in 2013, when it won Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year, and working for IceCube became my new goal and dream. […]
Week 32 at the Pole
The igloo—the prime attraction at the South Pole for the last few weeks—is no more. But before “disappearing,” its existence was memorialized in some final photos. Here you can see it with the names of its builders carved into the side, and it appears to almost glow from the soft white light from within. […]
Investigating excess of neutrinos from the galactic plane, summer research with IceCube
During my summer abroad, I worked with Dr. Jon Dumm, who is searching for an excess of neutrino events originating in the plane of the Milky Way. Dr. Dumm’s analysis is designed to look for a diffuse neutrino flux from the galactic plane in agreement with a map of where pion decay is expected to occur. However, this analysis is sensitive to a neutrino flux from point sources that are not necessarily distributed as the pion decay map predicts. We simulated four possible models of cosmic-ray source density in the galaxy as proxies for possible distributions of unresolved neutrino point sources. In doing so, we established limits on the total flux from various numbers of sources to which the primary pion-decay-based analysis is sensitive. […]