The site of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
At the bottom of the world, an observatory embedded in ice and designed to catch bountiful but elusive subatomic particles could give astronomers a brand-new look at the universe. An international team of scientists reported on Thursday that over a two-year period they had detected 28 of these particles, known as neutrinos, that arrived from outside the solar system and possibly from across the universe.
“This gives us a new way to do astronomy,” said Francis Halzen, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin who is the principal investigator for the project, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The findings appear in the journal Science.
Neutrinos are ghostlike particles that interact only very rarely with the rest of the universe. The fusion reactions that power the sun give off a flood of neutrinos, but almost all of them go undetected and unfelt: Every second, trillions of them pass through every person on earth.
The very-high-energy neutrinos detected by IceCube open a new spectrum for observing the universe.
