‘Tis the season for good tidings from the North Pole, but this week some particle physicists are giddy about a humongous gift at the South Pole. The world’s largest detector for high-energy neutrinos was completed December 18 when scientists lowered the last of 5,160 sensors more than a mile beneath the ice of the Antarctic plateau.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory will hunt for tiny particles that are common in the universe, but rarely interact with other matter. In fact, trillions of neutrinos pass through a person’s body each second. They rain down onto Earth as cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere. Neutrinos also shoot out of the violent insides of stellar explosions, churn regularly from the sun and may even arise from the ambient leftovers of the Big Bang.