#Neutrino telescopes how to#

If we build it on the surface, in fact it's not impossible, but it would be much more complicated because the surface of the Earth is bombarded by cosmic rays in incredible numbers and you would have to find these neutrinos in this rain of cosmic rays and it would be very challenging. HALZEN: Well, as I said, it's a particle detector. The only problem is that to actually look at the sky in an effective way, you have to build a kilometer cube detector.Īnd this had never been done before and so we took us about, since the idea to now, it took just half a century.įLATOW: Why do you build it a mile down beneath the ice where it's absolutely dark, right?

#Neutrino telescopes how to#

The only problem is that we collect light with our eyes, and with a mirror, neutrinos come as elementary particles and we know how to detect elementary particles. And so neutrinos, you can think of of as just another way, another form of flight and we discovered them in 1956 and as they have no electric charge, they make beams just like light beams.Īnd so we knew we could look at the sky with them. And this was probably the hardest way to do it, and that made it a challenge. I mean, when we know of another way to look at the sky and at the universe, you know, we have never been able to resist it. HALZEN: Well, I think your introduction was to the point. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.įLATOW: What are neutrinos and why are we so interested in them? Francis Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Bright professor in the physics department, University of Wisconsin in Madison. What are neutrinos? Why build a telescope a mile deep in the Antarctic ice? Well, here's a man with all the answers. What if you have to fix that? The frozen observatory is appropriately named IceCube and it's not looking for your typical star stuff, but the elusive neutrino. They have built a telescope a mile deep into the ice at the South Pole. We have sent probes beyond our solar system to study dark matter, colliding galaxies, how the planets formed.īut there is a group of scientists that is turning its eyes downward, and I mean way down. Astronomers and astrophysicists have traditionally, for centuries, looked upwards to the sky to learn more about the universe. We're broadcasting from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery in Madison, home this week of the Wisconsin Science Festival.