It's Full of Stars

Construction of the World’s Largest Neutrino Observatory Completed: Antarctica’s IceCube

Culminating a decade of planning, innovation and testing, construction of the world’s largest neutrino observatory, installed in the ice of the Antarctic plateau at the geographic South Pole, was successfully completed December 18, 2010, New Zealand time.

In the deep, dark, stillness of the Antarctic ice, IceCube records the rare collisions of neutrinos—elusive sub-atomic particles—with the atomic nuclei of the water molecules of the ice. Some neutrinos come from the sun, while others come from cosmic rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere and dramatic astronomical sources such as exploding stars in the Milky Way and other distant galaxies. Trillions of neutrinos stream through the human body at any given moment, but they rarely interact with regular matter, and researchers want to know more about them and where they come from.

On image above, a sensor descends down a hole in the ice as part of the final season of IceCube. IceCube is among the most ambitious scientific construction projects ever attempted.

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