06/10/2026
This year’s physics laureate Francis Halzen has laid the foundation for an entirely new type of astronomy. His idea was to use glacial ice at the South Pole to capture the secretive particles called neutrinos. The result was the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which can track neutrinos that originate in the distant cosmos.
The neutrino is the shyest particle in the universe, has no electric charge and almost no mass. In general, it passes unnoticed through matter – seldom does a neutrino make its presence felt by colliding with an atomic nucleus. Every second, without you noticing, 65 billion neutrinos from the Sun flow through your little finger nail.
Neutrinos also come from other regions of space, carrying clues to some of the mysteries of the cosmos. Researchers that succeed in capturing these rarer cosmic neutrinos can then extract information about the extreme environments in the universe where they originated.
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