Saturday, February 9, 2013

IceCube


The largest neutrino telescope in the world was completed in 2010, covers a cubic kilometer of ice deep in the Antarctic interior, and is called IceCube. You can read more about it here:
IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Neutrinos are odd things. They have mass (but very little) , no charge, and a cross-sectional area so small that they hardly ever interact with the "ordinary" matter that people can easily comprehend. "Ordinary" goes in quotation marks here since most of the mass-energy balance of the universe is dark to us.

Because of these bizarre properties, neutrinos are very difficult to see, and IceCube aims to do better than just register their presence. The idea is to characterize where high-energy neutrinos from deep space are coming from, and that requires lots of mass to get in the way. The Antarctic ice sheet beneath the south pole suits this task well. Its amazing the things people can do when they put their heads (and wallets) together.

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