![]() This tiny bit of mass may explain why the universe is made up of matter, not antimatter. But in the 1990s, a team of Japanese scientists discovered that they actually have a smidgen of mass. Particle physicists originally believed that neutrinos were massless. “They’re important to our understanding of the kind of processes that go on in the sun, and also an important building block for the blueprint of nature,” Hooper said. This is because they’re shot out as a byproduct of nuclear fusion from the sun – that’s the same process that produces sunlight. “They’re almost nothing at all, because they have almost no mass and no electric charge…They’re just little whisps of almost nothing.” Ghost particles, they’re often called.īut they are one of the universe’s essential ingredients, and they’ve played a role in helping scientists understand some of the most fundamental questions in physics.įor example, if you hold your hand toward the sunlight for one second, about a billion neutrinos from the sun will pass through it, says Dan Hooper, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. “Neutrinos are really pretty strange particles when you get down to it,” says John Conway, a professor of physics at University of California, Davis. But they are notoriously difficult to pin down. Born from violent astrophysical events like exploding stars and gamma ray bursts, they are fantastically abundant in the universe, and can move as easily through lead as we move through air. Average summer temperatures at the south pole is -18☏.Neutrinos are teeny, tiny, nearly massless particles that travel at near lightspeeds.The weight of the hose used for the drill is 25,000 lbs!.The average time to deploy a string is 11 hours.The amount of ice melted per hole is approximately 200,000 gallons.The average amount of fuel use to drill each hole is approximately 4800 gallons.The average depth of an IceCube hole is 2452 m.The time it took to drill IceCube's first hole was 57 hours!.The average time to drill a hole for IceCube is approximately 48 hours.The travel time from Los Angeles to the South Pole is approximately 48 hours.Each of the IceCube strings have a theme and each DOM has its own name!. ![]() The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been a major contributor as well.įrom the University of Wisconsin, we get these fun facts about the IceCube project: It was funded largely by the National Science Foundation and is now led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The IceCube collaboration team includes some 40 affiliated institutions in the US, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Barbados, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. "If we're lucky, we may also find clues about the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up about five times as much of the universe as all the stars, planets, and other normal matter combined." "We hope that the neutrinos detected by IceCube will provide the smoking gun that tells us where the cosmic rays are produced, and maybe they also will give us clues about the processes that accelerate them to such high energies," said Tyce DeYoung, an IceCube scientist and an assistant professor of physics at Penn State, one of the IceCube collaborators in a statement. "In a lab on the surface of the ice, signals from DOMs on many different strings are combined into a single data stream, which is analyzed to determine the direction and energy of the neutrino events that left their tracks," according to the Berkeley Lab Web site. Key to the $271 million IceCube telescope are its 5,160 basketball-sized detectors known as Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) and their photomultiplier tubes which ultimately will provide the data that lets scientists track neutrino events. Lower-energy neutrinos are known to come from the Sun, and others at higher energies come from cosmic rays interacting with the Earth's atmosphere and dramatic astronomical sources such as exploding supernovae in the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, the scientists stated. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos may be produced in such cataclysmic astrophysical events as violent explosions of gamma-ray bursts and in the energetic particle jets powered by massive black holes. ![]() And so just accidentally, they run straight into the nucleus of an atom and then create lots of other particles, which we can see and it's only these accidental crashes of neutrinos that allow us to observe them. The only difference is that light doesn't go through a wall whereas neutrinos go through everything. University of Wisconsin physics professor Francis Halzen said of neutrinos: "They are just like light there is basically no difference between neutrinos and light.
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