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IceCube Telescope Takes Shape Below Antarctic Ice

Posted by timothy on from the hard-mile-to-walk dept.

PabloSandoval48 writes "The world's largest telescope, currently under construction more than a mile beneath the Antarctic ice, is on schedule to be completed next year, according to a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, the lead institution for a scientific project called IceCube."

4 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. IceCube? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What, the rapper?

    No, seriously. I think I remember reading about this earlier this year in Scientific American or something ... only it was on a big lake in Russia and they worked during the winter when everything is frozen. Kind of cool, bleeding edge stuff.

    I gather that the one in the Antarctic will be bigger, and give a view in a different direction than the Russian one.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Interesting... by TrisexualPuppy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Would there, however, be any benefit to having such a project set up under lunar regolith/base rock if we could ever get back to the moon?

    1. Re:Interesting... by mcelrath · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ice Cube operates by observing visible Cerenkov radiation from electrons and muons created when high-energy neutrinos hit an atom in the ice, as they traverse the ice. Of course, ice being transparent to visible light is important here, and lunar regolith is opaque to visible light.

      However it has been proposed to look for radio waves being emitted in a similar manner. Cerenkov radiation is caused by moving faster than the speed of light in the medium -- it's the "blue glow" if you look at the picture on that wikipedia link, and emits a broad spectrum of radiation, down into radio frequencies. Depending on the composition of the regolith, it may be transparent to radio waves. This can be done from the Earth by pointing your antenna at the moon, or from satellite(s) in orbit around the moon. You might be interested in the Goldstone project. So, at least with proposals I've heard about, getting people on the moon to make big holes is not an important component, but the surface of the moon may still be useful for similar experiments. You never know though, maybe tomorrow someone will post a new idea!

      --
      1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
  3. Telescope? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not sure that a neutrino detector is any more of a telescope than the sensor that decides when it's time for the lights to come on at night.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black