Newswise — It's summer at the South Pole now, with 24 hours of daylight. And that marks the high season for research, despite extreme temperatures hovering around 40 degrees below zero with the wind chill!
James Roth and Chris Elliott, both senior electronics instrument specialists from the University of Delaware, and their international colleagues are working at South Pole Station now, helping to construct the world's largest neutrino telescope, named “IceCube,” over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice sheet. Our UD research team is constructing the telescope's surface array of detectors called “IceTop.”
Neutrinos are cosmic particles formed from exploding stars (supernovae) and galaxies. Because they have no charge and thus interact only weakly with other particles, neutrinos are difficult to detect as they zip through the universe at the speed of light. And they may travel for many light years before interacting with anything. That's why it takes such large and sensitive telescopes to stand a shot at detecting them.
Read the researchers' blogs on this Web site (http://www.expeditions.udel.edu/antarctica/). They will be reporting their activities through Dec. 18.
Through UD's pilot program “Extreme 2009: An Antarctic Adventure,” K-12 classrooms and the public can follow along via the Web site and a full-color, content-rich, informational guide (http://www.expeditions.udel.edu/antarctica/studyguide/). Free, printed copies are available for Delaware classroom use. Order copies via this Web site.
Selected Delaware classrooms will participate in a “Phone Call to the Deep Freeze” on Wed., Dec. 16, which will link them with UD researchers working at South Pole Station, as well as in Germany, and at the Bartol Research Institute at UD's Newark campus.
The program is the outreach component to research grants led by Thomas Gaisser, the Martin A. Pomerantz Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UD. The program is funded by the National Science Foundation and coordinated by UD's Office of Communications and Marketing.
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