The sun has set, they’ve held their traditional sunset dinner, and yet … it’s still light outside. Well, that’s twilight. Even after the sun falls below the horizon, the scattering of light in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface. […]
The IceCube, ANTARES, Virgo and LIGO collaborations have joined efforts to look for neutrino emission from the second gravitational wave (GW) event as well as from a previous GW candidate. IceCube and ANTARES searched for neutrinos in temporal coincidence and from the directional constraints provided by LIGO. Within 500 seconds around the two GW signals, no neutrino events were found that come within from the signal region in either detector. These results have recently been submitted to Physical Review D. […]
The American Physical Society has awarded Benjamin Jones, an IceCube collaborator and an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, the Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics, which is widely considered the most prestigious dissertation award in the field. […]
This photo at sunset is a picture that paints a thousand words, reminding us that the South Pole is technically a desert. The windswept snow forms into sastrugi, or sharp, irregular grooves and ridges on the hard snow surface. They can create interesting shapes and take on strange appearances, sometimes looking a bit like waves crashing to shore. […]
Pull up a chair—sunset at the South Pole takes weeks, not hours. And why is that? Because the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted, the poles gradually proceed from full exposure to full shadow (and back again) as the Earth travels around the sun. […]
The fourth edition of the IceCube Masterclass hosted over 200 students at 14 institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the US. Stony Brook University, which joined the masterclass program for the first time, had a full program for women. The positive interaction with scientists is again one of the things that students value most from this program. The masterclasses were held on March 8, 11 and 22. […]
A tree grows at the South Pole. Well, not really. It’s not an actual tree (rather, a sculpture made of copper), and it’s definitely not growing. But it looks like a tree—great photo! […]
Up until almost the last minute, the summer activities at the Pole kept the IceCube crew busy. This summer, a dozen IceCube researchers and staff, from eight institutions and six countries, spent some time at the Admundsen-Scott South Pole Station to perform maintenance and operations for IceCube and help prepare for a future deployment of the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) detector. A PolarTREC teacher, Kate Miller, also traveled to the Pole to join the team, contributing to an extensive educational and outreach program that is still in progress. […]
It was rather overcast last week. In fact, in this photo of the IceCube Lab (ICL), it’s almost hard to tell where the snowy landscape ends and the cloudy sky begins. This view of the ICL is from the vantage point of the geographic South Pole. […]
Another week, another sun dog. This nice photo taken of sun dogs at the Pole also shows off a blue sky, some low-lying clouds, and the South Pole Telescope far off to the left. […]