By D. Setton
The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Image courtesy of Sven Lidstrom, IceCube/NSF A mammoth neutrino experiment near the South Pole has, for the first time, detected high-energy neutrinos from beyond our solar system. The 28 neutrinos captured by the IceCube detector had a billion times more energy than the neutrinos generated by an exploding star, hinting at an astronomical source beyond our galaxy of unfathomable power. The neutrinos mark the beginning of an exciting new field of high-energy neutrino astrophysics. “I cannot predict the future but I hope that this may someday be as successful as all the other times when we found new ways to study the universe, like radio astronomy and X-ray astronomy,” says University of Wisconsin physicist Francis Halzen, principal investigator on the experiment.
A digital optical module (DOM) being lowered into the hole of an IceCube string. The ...
