Science
The Telescope Buried Under the South Pole
IceCube is a detector frozen deep in Antarctic ice that looks for neutrinos instead of light, and the Short ties it to the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Francis Halzen. It explains that a neutrino occasionally hits the ice and makes a faint blue flash that sensors pick up. By mostly watching for tracks coming up through the Earth, IceCube traced one particle back to a distant galaxy.
The numbers
- IceCube fills a cubic kilometre of ice with 5,160 light sensors on 86 cables.
- The sensors sit between 1,450 and 2,450 metres below the surface.
- Roughly a hundred trillion neutrinos pass through your body each second.
- In 2017 a track pointed to blazar TXS 0506+056, about 4 billion light-years away.
Sources cited in the video: IceCube Neutrino Observatory · Science (2018) · CNN · AIP · Solar System Scope
