Sci News, etc: IceCube, huge neutrino observatory, completed under South Pole
..graphic by P. Preuss, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
The real neutrino news from the great white south will come when a bunch of data tells humankind something new about the cosmos. But word that the greatest neutrino observatory of all is finally finished after years of drilling holes and dropping strings of instruments down, its individual muon detectors spread through a cubic kilometer of crystalline ice deep under the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, merits attention. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has to it a spookiness, always a good ingredient for story telling. It will give thrills to lay readers who hadn’t heard of it before. Its thousands of photomultiplier “digital optical modules” of DOMs will catch an occasional flash of blue light, emitted by a few unlucky neutrinos zipping UP through the ice, having pierced the entire Earth after twinkling their way through cosmic distances. A rare few happen to smack exactly into an atomic nucleus. They shower debris along their direction, emitting a distinctive glow of Cherenkov radiation from muons slowing down from light speed. From these twinkles will come maps of neutrino sources in the sky, including exploding stars and matter draining into black holes. The rest, the undetected neutrinos, zip through the sky to continue their intergalactic travels.
The emplacement of the last of the detectors is a ritual built on a technicality. Most of the detectors are already in place, already recording the cosmic flux of neutrinos. But it’s a good enough reason to write this thing up, prepare people a bit to hear any true news from its work. This is a good time of year to finish up IceCube too. Each DOM looks sort of like a glass ornament, but big as a basketball. Y’know, miniatures would make nifty Christmas tree baubles, especially if they occasionally gave off a flash of Cherenkov blue.
Stories:
- Science News – Marissa Cevallos: South Pole neutrino detector complete ; Good well-paced job. But to say, as this and many stories do, that the signals occur when a neutrino happens to collide with a water molecule is pretty fuzzy. It’s ice. Molecules, including their electron orbitals, are packed tight. The neutrinos cannot miss traversing zillions of them. So, what’s it mean to hit one? It has something to do with long-shot weak interaction within the nucleus. A news story needn’t go deeply into that. But it should at least hint why most of a molecule is neutrino-transparent.
- Fox News – Blake Snow : One of the World’s biggest Telescopes Is Buried Beneath the South Pole; Freelancer Snow is nothing if not enthusiastic. The style is lively. But he needs to slow down just a jot, grabbing a dictionary or geography tome once in awhile. He has some odd usages and nouns in here. He says this is paid for by a $272 million endowment from the NSF. Endowment? Besides, $242 million of the grant is from NSF, the rest from German and Swedish institutions. And, alas, he gets his arctic and antarctic mixed up, with a dash of Green Bay thrown in, when he says this thing is “buried across one cubic kilometer of Antarctica’s frozen tundra.” Even with global warming, ain’t no tundra on that ice sheet. One doubts that even the Ant. Peninsula’s stony outcrops have warmed enough to grow tundra.
- FastCompany – Nel Underleider: $271 Million Telescope Buried Under South POle Is Ready to Unearth Dark Matter ;
- Wisconsin State Journal – Ron Seely : UW – Wisconsin to unlock space secrets in Antarctica with IceCube. This is a hed of an unusual sort: it means nothing to the uninitiated. But it contains such an odd mix of elements that readers may be compelled to zero in just to find out what the heck it’s about. The piece does reward – explaining things in clear lay language, and blessed with atmosphere thanks to a visit with the lead researcher while the final installation was underway. Plus, the paper assigned an artist for its own graphic rendition of the essentials.
Grist for the Mill:
U. Wisconsin-Madison Press Release ; U. Delaware Press Release ; IceCube Neutrino Observatory Website + Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; AIP 2010 Review Article: Ice Cube: An instrument for neutrino astronomy ;
And if you’re really interested, don’t miss this super duper hi-res photo of the IceCube above ground facility. It’s part of a gallery.
- Charlie Petit
