Okay, so there hasn’t been an official IceCube press release on this, not until the paper finishes collaboration review and is posted on the Arxiv, but there have been some talks showing neutrino events observed by IceCube which are almost certainly astrophysical in origin. Short version, neutrino astronomy is now a real thing. We are observing the universe in photons (ever since we looked up at the night sky, and starting with Galileo with increasingly sophisticated instruments) and also in neutrinos (which travel undisturbed from deep within the astrophysical objects, reflecting the nuclear interactions deep within).
One of the over 5000 DOMs (Digital Optical Modules) which make up the IceCube Observatory being deployed into the ice.
There’s a nice Gizmodo article with interesting comments.
University of Wisconsin news item.
Phys.org coverage of the news item.
New Scientist entry written by our friend Anil who got to visit IceCube during construction.
Since the middle of last week, the news are spread around and there are Russian, Spanish, and French language versions (at a minimum!) of the news. Previously, only the neutrinos from Supernova 1987A had been seen from beyond the sun and the Earth’s atmosphere. Analysis is still ongoing, so this isn’t a final result by any means, but it is a proof-of-functionality of the IceCube detector and of neutrino astronomy.
Addition:
Scientific American’s article includes good quotes from the three Wisconsin-Madison postdocs who led the analysis, Nathan, Claudio, and Naoko.
