Latest IceCube Neutrino Observatory Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Within the heart of exploding stars, sparse halos of neutrinos exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up the Universe. Although neutrinos are similar to the electron, they have one important difference; they carry no electrical charge. Being electrically neutral, they are not...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists will be using IceCube, the world's largest telescope buried under the South Pole, to hunt for neutrinos. IceCube is bigger than the Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower and Shanghai's World Financial Center combined, taking a total of 10 years to build. The telescope is designed to help scientists understand the mysterious tiny particles known as neutrinos. These particles are emitted by exploding stars and move...

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have taken the first steps to determine how the highest energy cosmic rays are produced. Francis Halzen, the IceCube principal investigator, said that although they haven't discovered where cosmic rays have come from, they have made a big leap forward in ruling out one of the leading predictions. The researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Nature that they searched for neutrinos emitted from 300 gamma ray bursts between...

The Antarctic IceCube observatory, an amazing underground observatory for viewing subatomic particles has finally been completed after ten years of work in a cube of ice under the South Pole. Building the IceCube, the world's largest observatory, has been a punishing decade-long process in the Antarctic tundra. But now completed, it will allow scientists to study space particles in the search for dark matter, invisible material that makes up most of the Universe's mass. The observatory,...

Katherine Shirey, a high school physics teacher from Arlington, Virginia, has traveled to the ends of the earth to work on IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope made entirely out of ice. She has endured temperatures of -35 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 hours of daylight, and extreme altitudes all in the name of science.Students nationwide have been following Katherine's adventure through her blog.As the country's teaching ambassador at the South Pole, Ms. Shirey has posed and answered a...

The National Science Foundation has signed a five-year, $34.5-million agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to operate a unique telescope--a cubic kilometer in volume--buried in the Antarctic ice sheet between 1,400 meters and 2,400 meters deep.The collaborative agreement covers the cost of operating the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located in the ice under the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The observatory records the rare collisions of neutrinos, elusive sub-atomic...

Searching below the surface of Antarctica for the mysterious neutrinoThere's nothing like temperatures that can reach minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit to keep you on your toes.For engineers Erik Verhagen and Camille Parisel, working in Antarctica on a project appropriately called "IceCube" is both challenging and exciting.While there are ways to get used to the harsh climate, these experts have to be very resourceful to fix technical difficulties so far away from...

In December 2010, IceCube -- the world's first kilometer-scale neutrino observatory, which is located beneath the Antarctic ice -- will finally be completed after two decades of planning. In an article in the AIP's Review of Scientific Instruments, Francis Halzen, the principal investigator of the IceCube project, and his colleague Spencer Klein of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provide a comprehensive description of the observatory, its instrumentation, and its scientific...

Though still under construction, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory  at the South Pole is already delivering scientific results "” including an early finding about a phenomenon the telescope was not even designed to study.IceCube captures signals of notoriously elusive but scientifically fascinating subatomic particles called neutrinos. The telescope focuses on high-energy neutrinos that travel through the Earth, providing information about faraway cosmic events such as supernovas and...

Will the universe expand outward for all of eternity and end in a vast, dark, cold, sterile, diffuse nothingness? Or will the "Big Bang" "” the gargantuan explosion that formed the universe 14 billion years ago "” end in the "Big Crunch?" Planets, stars and galaxies all hurtle inward and collapse into an incredibly hot, dense mass a billion times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And then "¦ KA-BOOOOM!!! Another Big Bang and another universe forms...