Icecube tagged posts

Gamma-ray flares from blazars can be accompanied by high-energy neutrino emission. To better understand this phenomenon, an international research team has statistically analyzed 145 bright blazars. They constructed weekly binned light curves and utilized a Bayesian algorithm, finding that their sample was dominated by blazars with low flare duty cycles and energy fractions. The study suggests that high-energy neutrinos of blazars might be produced mainly during the flare phase.

Blazars ...

Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a hazy band of stars stretching from horizon to horizon.

For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghost-like astronomical messengers.

In research published June 29 in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration—an international group of more than 350 scientists—presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission coming from the Milky Way.

We have not...

Physicists at MIT have designed a pocket-sized cosmic ray muon detector to track these ghostly particles. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Pocket-sized device detects charged particles in surrounding air. At any given moment, Earth’s atmosphere is showered with high-energy cosmic rays that have been blasted from supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena far beyond the Solar System. When cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they decay into muons – charged particles that are slightly heavier than an electron. Muons last only fractions of a second, and during their fleeting lifespan they can be found through every layer of Earth’s atmosphere, circulating in the air around us and raining onto the surface at a rate similar to a light drizzle...

IceCube is a neutrino detector composed of 5,160 optical modules embedded in a gigaton of crystal-clear ice a mile beneath the geographic South Pole. PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

For a decade, astronomers have puzzled over fast radio bursts, FRBs, which were first detected in 2007 by astronomers scouring archival data from Australia’s Parkes Telescope, a 64-meter diameter dish best known for its role receiving live televison images from the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. But the antenna’s detection of the first FRB – and the subsequent confirmed discovery of nearly two dozen more powerful radio pulses across the sky by Parkes and other radio telsescopes – has sent astrophysicists scurrying to find more of the objects and to explain them.

“It’s a new class of astronomical ...