AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today to a man with a dream. Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to build an observatory under Antarctica. And as he told the Nobel committee, in the beginning, there were a lot of skeptics.
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FRANCIS HALZEN: This project, everybody thought is a cute idea that won't work.
CHANG: But it did work. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has more.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The observatory is at the South Pole.
NAOKO KURAHASHI NEILSON: It's very flat and very white and desolate (laughter).
BRUMFIEL: Naoko Kurahashi Neilson has been there. She's a physicist at Drexel University, and she's one of hundreds who's worked on Halzen's project. Now, normal observatories need to see the sky, but this one is buried over a mile under the ice. Strings of what look like big light bulbs are frozen in the dark.
KURAHASHI NEILSON: We have over 5,000 of these sensors, kilometer by kilometer by kilometer, and that's our detector. That's really it.
BRUMFIEL: This cubic kilometer of ice is called IceCube, of course. IceCube is looking for ghostly particles from deep space called neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny. They rarely interact with anything. Most pass straight through the ice. But every now and then, one creates a little flash of light. That flash of light is picked up by those light bulb-like detectors. Sounds easy enough, but there's a big problem.
KURAHASHI NEILSON: A billion. What's after a billion? A trillion, right? So for every one space neutrino we catch, there's about a trillion particles made in the Earth's atmosphere that's essentially background to us.
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BRUMFIEL: It's like trying to pick out a single note from this chaotic musical arrangement, which, by the way, is a sonification of real data from the detector.
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BRUMFIEL: Neilson has dedicated her career to trying to find these single space neutrinos to get a picture of where they came from. After years of work...
KURAHASHI NEILSON: You know those old-school TVs from the '80s when it's just static and goes (imitating static buzz), and you think you can make something out but not really? We're kind of there.
BRUMFIEL: But the picture is starting to get a little less fuzzy. Erin O'Sullivan is IceCube spokesperson and a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. One by one, she says, IceCube is beginning to find the source of these neutrinos.
ERIN O'SULLIVAN: The very first one was in 2017. We saw a neutrino that was from the direction of a blazar. So this is a supermassive black hole.
BRUMFIEL: Others came from somewhere in our own galaxy. All this is thanks to Francis Halzen. He dreamed big and brought others in on that dream. Four hundred fifty researchers in 14 countries are celebrating with him.
O'SULLIVAN: And I think I speak on behalf of the whole collaboration when we say, congratulations, Francis, on this great achievement.
BRUMFIEL: There's much more to be done, but for the scientists who work on IceCube, today was a good day. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE CUBE SONG, "IT WAS A GOOD DAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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