The Neutrino Telescope

The sun is finally above the horizon! One sunrise and one sunset per year, something to celebrate. But the temps are still what we've seen for a long time and won't change drastically until November, after I leave...Go figure!

In my last post I mentioned the high winds and how snow drifting had accumulated around the station. The below image was taken in January when I arrived and when a lot of snow moving and clearing takes place to keep things accessible during the busy summer season.

The below photo was taken about a week ago. Need I say more?

The Neutrino Telescope, IceCube!

This particular telescope takes up an entire square kilometer of space and is mostly under the ice. It doesn't look up at the heavens, but instead looks for signs of high energy particles traversing the earth from light years away, even from the edge of the universe. These high-energy subatomic "ghost" particles are called neutrinos and travel immense cosmological distances practically unchanged since they were born 15 billion years ago, soon after the formation of the universe. Neutrinos are also produced in space during the birth, collision, and deaths of stars, more so during the explosions of supernovae.

Below photos by Christian C. "Dr. Sprinkles"

The IceCube Lab sits above the ice and contains all of the equipment needed to power and monitor the detector array that is deep in the ice, almost two miles deep. The array consists of 86 strings of 60 sensors each for a total of 5,160 sensors that were lowered into the ice after holes were drilled with a specially designed hot water drill. In the blow image one can begin to grasp the scale of the sensor array that is buried deep below the lab.

Each sensor or DOM (Digital Optical Module) contains very light sensitive electronics that can detect passing neutrinos only by the light they emit when interacting with the very clear, transparent ice that is found deep in the Antarctic plateau, hence the term "ghost" particle, the actual particle is not seen. The DOMs time stamp the light emitted and reconstruct a direction of travel from a possible point of origin in space. Neutrinos are studied to gain a better understanding of the universe and are also candidates for dark matter, specifically hot dark matter, another cosmic mystery. 

In the above photo you can see a DOM of the type that make up the sensor array, not small or lightweight. The IceCube experiment runs without issue, most of the time, but when things do go wrong corrective action needs to be swift. Below are components that were being re-built after failure and put back into service. Repairs are done by the two person science team assigned to the telescope.

Next Post? The Clean Air Sector