Last week was fairly relaxed at the Pole. Some testing and troubleshooting with the detector, but all went rather smoothly. As for the skies? They were glowing. And swirling, and shimmering. The auroras sometimes swirl into shapes suggesting all kinds of things. […]
Although the sky is not yet dark, auroras appeared for the first time this austral winter. It was a good thing the detector ran well this week, because the winterovers were excited to experiment photographing the colorful night sky. […]
Each winter, once it gets dark enough, the station covers up all of its windows to prevent light from interfering with light-sensitive projects at the South Pole. This year they decided to have a contest for the window cover art entries. […]
Didn’t we say the sun had set already? We did. But that doesn’t mean the sky goes absolutely dark right away. It’s a slow sunset, with light lingering even after the sun has dipped below the horizon. This image shows a great twilight shot of a clear sky with some color along the horizon and the IceCube Lab in the distance. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has tested a few models of heavy dark matter and found no evidence that the high-energy neutrinos can be attributed to the decay of dark matter particles. This nondetection resulted in a new lower limit for the lifetime of dark matter particles with a mass of 10 TeV or above. The paper summarizing these results has just been submitted to the European Physical Journal C. […]
Who needs the sun when you have a moon like this! This image shows the moon hanging low above the Dark Sector, home to the South Pole Telescope, shown here, in addition to the IceCube Lab, BICEP, and MAPO. […]
At the South Pole, you never know whether the skies will be clear enough to capture a nice image of that last flicker before the sun goes below the horizon. Last week a big storm rolled in that threatened things, but it cleared in time for the winterovers to capture some great photos and bid the sun adieu for a while. […]
Last week was stormy at the Pole, according to IceCube’s winterovers. Guess that’s where these icy blotches stuck to the window came from. The detector was relatively quiet, but there was plenty of other activity to keep the winterovers busy. […]
The fifth edition of the IceCube Masterclass hosted over 300 students at 17 institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. […]
It takes a long time for the sun to set at the South Pole. Maybe just as well for last week. It allowed IceCube’s winterovers to continue taking outdoor photographs of the landscape, and it gave them some light to see what they were doing while out in the field, driving around and measuring the snow height at all the IceTop stations. […]