The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments a volume of roughly one cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice with 5,160 digital optical modules (DOMs) at depths between 14 meters. And the strange thing about the neutrino is that even now nobody understands it very well, and it's one of the forefronts of particle physics because it just is this really weird particle. The only ones that were known in 1930 when Wolfgang Pauli had this incredible feat of kind of insight and intuition were the proton, the photon, and the electron. It was, interestingly, one of the first elementary particles to be discovered. It's a very basic constituent of matter and it's really odd and very hard to detect. So, in layman's terms, what exactly is a neutrino?īOWEN: It is an elementary particle, that means I don't think it can be broken up into anything else. He spoke with Living on Earth host Steve Curwood.ĬURWOOD: So, IceCube is designed to detect neutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles. KAISER: The telescope’s creation story is also an epic tale that writer Mark Bowen captures in his book The Telescope in the Ice. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is made up of thousands of light detectors, buried in a cubic kilometer of diamond-clear ice at the South Pole.ĭOERING: It’s searching for neutrinos – tiny, almost massless subatomic particles that can pass through a light-year of lead without slowing down, and perhaps they can even shed light on how our universe formed after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. KAISER: But one of the most exciting new telescopes doesn’t “look” at anything at all, in the traditional sense. Ever since Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens four centuries ago, these finely tuned instruments have produced breathtaking images – of planets, and other galaxies. KAISER: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jaime Kaiser.ĭOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering, we’re in for Steve Curwood.
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