The University of Wisconsin is leading a project to embed a massive neutrino detecting telescope in the Antarctic ice sheet, called IceCube. It will use thousands of Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) to look for the characteristic blue flashes which occur when neutrinos collide with ice. Since neutrinos normally zip straight through everything, collecting enough observations to learn about them is challenging and requires specialized detectors.
The project will try to identify point sources of high energy neutrinos, investigate their connection with gamma ray bursts, and may provide experimental data relevant to dark matter or string theory.
Antarctic Experiment Finds Puzzling Distribution of Cosmic Rays
“A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. … It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another.” The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.