Francis Halzen proposed in 1988 that burying light sensors deep in Antarctic ice could catch the rare moments when a neutrino strikes an ice atom and produces a faint flash of blue light, known as Cherenkov radiation. This idea became the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, completed in 2011 with a cubic kilometer of ice instrumented by light sensors reaching 2.5 kilometers deep. In 2013, IceCube found the first evidence of neutrinos arriving from outside the solar system, opening a new way to observe violent cosmic events through these nearly massless, hard-to-detect particles.
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An estimated 65 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through a human fingernail every second, illustrating how rarely they interact with matter.
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IceCube uses more than 5,000 light sensors frozen into the ice to detect the faint flashes left by neutrino collisions.
136 words · auto-generated from the episode video
0:02A particle physicist from Belgium who spent decades turning the South Pole into a telescope, the target, the neutrino, the shyest particle in the universe. 65 billion from the sun pass through your fingernail every second, almost none ever stop. In 1988, Francis Halzen proposed a wild idea. When a neutrino does hit an atom in ice, it leaves a faint flash of blue light. So, fill the Antarctic ice with sensors and watch. By 2011, IceCube was complete.
0:44A cubic kilometer of ice and more than 5,000 light sensors, frozen up to 2.5 kilometers deep. In 2013, it found the first evidence of neutrinos from beyond our solar system. Messengers that fly straight from the most violent places in the cosmos, a new kind of astronomy. And this is the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.