Buried a mile deep in the Antarctic ice, the Ice Cube Neutrino Detector Array promises a new kind of astronomy. When completed, Ice Cube will occupy a cubic kilometer of deep ice, transforming the polar ice cap into a detector capable of sampling the high-energy neutrinos that emanate from some of the most distant and violent phenomena in the cosmos - colliding black holes, galaxies with super violent cores and mysterious gamma ray bursts. Like ghostly messengers, high-energy neutrinos traverse huge distances, passing through stars, planets, magnetic fields and entire galaxies without skipping a beat.
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Photos from the AMANDA project in Antarctica
Scientists with the National Science Foundation-funded AMANDA Telescope project work at this South Pole research station. (Photo: Robert Morse)
Scientists with the National Science Foundation-funded AMANDA Telescope drill deep holes such as this one in the South Pole ice, where they have deployed an array of neutrino detectors. Sunk more than 1.5 kilometers beneath the ice, the AMANDA Telescope array is designed to look down through the Earth to the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. (Photo: Robert Morse)
An optical module is prepared for its descent. The glass modules at the heart of AMANDA work like light bulbs in reverse, capturing the faint and fleeting streaks of light created when the occasional neutrino crashes into another particle such as a proton. (Photo: Robert Morse)
The photomultiplier tubes within these basketball-sized glass orbs are at the heart of the AMANDA neutrino telescope. (Photo: Jeff Miller)