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Celebrating IceCubeâs first decade of discovery For news media
The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
It was the beginning of a grand experiment unlike anything the world had ever seen. Ten years ago today, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory fully opened its eyes for the first time.
Over the course of the previous seven years, dozens of intrepid technicians, engineers, and scientists had traveled to the South Pole â one of the coldest, driest and most isolated places on Earth â to build the biggest, strangest telescope in the world. Crews drilled 86 holes nearly two-and-a-half kilometers deep and lowered a cable strung with 60 basketball-sized light detectors into each hole.
IceCube: A decade in review
On May 13, 2011, the U.S. National Science Foundation s IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory took its first set of data known as a physics run as a fully configured facility. Since then, the facility has yielded groundbreaking results! In 2012, IceCube detected the highest energy neutrinos ever observed at that time. During its 10 years of operation, scientific breakthroughs enabled by IceCube have been published in over 150 papers in scientific journals. In celebration of the facility’s 10th anniversary, learn more about IceCube through images. May 13, 2021
Credit: AMANDA Collaboration
It took seven years to construct the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, designed to search for nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. However, planning began much earlier. In 1990, the proof of principle for IceCube, called AMANDA, was field-tested in Greenland. Fourteen years later, construction at the South Pole was ready to begin.
On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth.
IceCube Neutrino Observatory
The cosmic invader –a messenger from the depths of extragalactic space, carrying secrets from some of the most extreme physics in the universe– triggered a cacophony of code-red detectors in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (image below) located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, perhaps solving one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos.
High-energy cosmic ray sources are being mapped for the first time
Ikaro Stars
In 2008, Farrar and an author proposed that cataclysms called tidal events (TDEs) can be a source of very high-energy cosmic rays.
A TDE occurs when a star pulls a Fear and gets too close to a supermassive black hole. The star’s front feels much more severe than its back, as the star shrinks and turns into an abyss. The vortex lasts about a year. As it lasts, two jets of material subatomic fragments of a broken star are thrown in opposite directions through a black hole. Shock waves and magnetic fields from these rays could be conspired before the nuclei could be accelerated to space at very high energies.