Rare tiny neutrinos may have huge implications for astronomy

[jakeXT]

The 28 subatomic particles from deep space detected within an Antarctic glacier are mysterious and extremely powerful, suggesting a new way of looking at the universe, scientists say.

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The neutrinos identified by the IceCube team are roughly a billion times as energetic as the solar neutrinos streaming out of the sun's nuclear furnace. Whatever created them must have been extremely powerful, utterly mysterious, or both.

"This is a landmark discovery — possibly a Nobel Prize in the making," said Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA astroparticle physicist who was not involved in the IceCube collaboration.

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But the IceCube team wanted to make a big detector: More real estate would mean a larger collecting area and raise researchers' chances of collecting the neutrinos they wanted. They identified a cubic kilometer of pure, clear Antarctic ice, which is an ideal medium for detecting neutrinos because eons of compression have pushed out all the air bubbles.

It took seven years for the IceCube team to complete the detector. To do so, they had to drill narrow holes in the pristine ice and lower 86 strings containing 60 digital detectors each. When a neutrino makes contact with the ice — only one in a million neutrinos do, Halzen said — it produces a flash of blue light that the network of 5,160 detectors picks up.

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http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-neutrinos-20131122,0,4562096.story