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Deep beneath the ice of Antarctica, the world’s strangest observatory has finally reached completion. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a gigantic telescope at the South Pole that is designed to detect elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos that travel through Earth at the speed of light.
Construction of the telescope ended last weekend although it has already been collecting data for several years. Very little is known about neutrinos, but they are believed to carry information about the birth of our galaxy and the mystery of black holes.
Physicists think that they are born when violent cosmic events, such as colliding galaxies or distant black holes, occur at the very edges of the universe.
Able to travel billions of light years through space without being absorbed or deflected either by magnetic fields or by atoms, these mysterious high-energy particles could provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the universe.
But first you have to find them.
So scientists are using ice to watch for that rare occasion that a neutrino crashes into one of the atoms making up the molecules of water ice.
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