After nearly two decades of planning, the $270 million IceCube neutrino observatory is finally being built in the frozen desert of Antarctica. The observatory may finally be able to observe and study neutrinos, which until now have remained largely allusive.
Aside from light, neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe. And yet, the nature of the highly-energized particles remain one of physics’ great mysteries. Neutrinos have nearly no mass and react weakly with matter. So, despite their abundance, they are frustratingly difficult to observe. Everyday, trillions of neutrinos pass through your body and those of
everyone you know without any effect.
That’s where IceCube comes in.
Neutrinos can be measured on the rare occasions that they interact with the nucleus of an atom creating a new particle called a muon along with a faint amount of blue light. In order to detect these faint blue light events, physicists led by the University of Wisconsin decided to build an observatory with thousands of optical sensors in the clean, clear ice of Antarctica. The IceCube observatory, at almost 1km in length and with over 5,160 optical sensors, is FAR larger than any neutrino observatory that has been attempted before.
Francis Halzen, the IceCube Project’s principal investigator was quoted by Physorg commenting that observatory “has been totally optimized for size in order to be sensitive to the very
small neutrino fluxes that may reveal the sources of cosmic rays and
the particle nature of dark matter.” Dark matter is the mysterious, unobservable stuff that makes up over a quarter of the known universe. It would be a revolution in our view of the cosmos if we can get a handle on all that stuff.
Trust me, it’s cool.
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