A Telescope In a Cubic Kilometer of Ice 118
Roland Piquepaille writes "University of Delaware (UD) scientists and engineers are currently working at the South Pole under very harsh conditions. This research team is one of the many other ones working on the construction of IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. When it is completed in 2011, the telescope array will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica. One of the lead researchers said that 'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.' The UD team has even opened a blog to cover this expedition. It will be opened up to December 22, 2008. I guess they want to be back in Delaware for Christmas, but read more for additional details and references, including a diagram of this telescope array built inside ice."
Re:Not a telescope. (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess a telescope isn't a telescope, it's a light detector. It detects light that hits it mirrors...
These neutrino telescopes work by detecting Cherenkov Radiation created by the collision by-products and then determining the track of the particle that is emmiting the Cherenkov Radiation. The momentum of the original Neutrino is conserved so the track of the by-product is very close to the original trajectory.
You filter out downward tracks because they are generally caused by atmospheric cosmic radiation - the earth is basically your filter here, only neutrino's will be coming up through the earth. It's called a telescope because they hope to be able to correlate neutrino tracks with actual stellar objects - once the detector is large enough (hence the cubic kilometer size) there should be a sufficient cross section of matter to have a regular set of interactions from persistent neutrino sources.
This is an extension of the AMANDA research project, they drilled the original series of test holes in the 90's to prove the process would work - I helped build some of the detector equipment back in Wisconsin while I was an undergrad there.
Re:important safety tip: (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that The Thing is required viewing at the start of each Winter Season at the South Pole research station - if you think about who actually would spend a winter at the south pole I think you can see why they would be all over this kind of thing.
Re:South central actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
IceCube is designed to detect neutrino events only from the northern hemisphere. Neutrinos from the sky in the southern hemisphere get confused with other atmospheric muons events. So they screen out all events coming from above, and only look at those coming from below, i.e. from the north. Neutrinos have no problem passing through the Earth, but all other particles do, so they know that events from below come from neutrinos.
Still, you can rephrase the question: why don't they build a detector in the Arctic to look for southern events? The only place there's that much land ice is Greenland. There isn't much infrastructure there. There is some already at the South Pole. I suspect that's the reason. But if IceCube proves successful, maybe they'll think about a Greenland version.