New Scientist has more on the possible discovery of two cosmic neutrinos near the South Pole:
In June last year the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole reported the sighting of two candidate neutrinos, found somewhat by accident as the team was combing through the data. Bert and Ernie (YT: Bert and Ernie Cookies in Bed), as they are affectionately dubbed, each had energies of about 1 petaelectronvolt (PeV).
IceCube monitors a cubic kilometre of ice at the South Pole. It is made of 5160 digital optical modules embedded like vertical strings of pearls at depths ranging from 1.45 to 2.45 kilometres below the surface. These modules look for light emitted when neutrinos strike the ice.
According to an analysis by the IceCube collaboration, released on Monday, the odds that Bert and Ernie were the results of atmospheric shenanigans are greater than 370-to-1. In other words, there is a reasonable chance they came from more distant reaches of the galaxy – or beyond.
…
If they are being generated by charm mesons in the atmosphere, the particles should be clustered around 100 TeV, and the numbers should tail off as the energy reaches 1 PeV. Bert and Ernie would be outliers.
If the neutrinos do not match this pattern, the likelihood that they are from farther out in space would go up significantly.
“It is an incredibly exciting result, the beginning of real high-energy neutrino astronomy, a dream I have had for many decades. I am very happy for them,” says John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, who is not on the IceCube team. “I can’t wait to see how this plays out.”
These guys could open up a whole new way of figuring out what’s going on in deep space.