Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
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Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsSign up for the latest discoveries, groundbreaking research and fascinating breakthroughs that impact you and the wider world direct to your inbox.Feed your curiosity with an exclusive mystery every week, solved with science and delivered direct to your inbox before it's seen anywhere else.Sign up to our free science & technology newsletter for your weekly fix of fascinating articles, quick quizzes, amazing images, and moreSign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!An ice-bound"ghost particle" detector at the South Pole just got a major upgrade. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has expanded for the first time in its 15 years of service. Technicians have added more than 600 new instruments to the bottom of the detector, which now consists of 92 strings of neutrino detectors buried in a cubic kilometer of ice near Amundsen-Scott South Pole research station.— nicknamed"ghost particles" because they are nearly massless and chargeless subatomic particles that zip through space and matter at nearly the speed of light. Neutrinos are everywhere; about 100 trillion pass through every person on Earth every second. But because they rarely interact with the matter they pass through, they're hard to detect.At IceCube, scientists detect tiny flashes of light that occur when neutrinos do interact with matter and produce secondary particles. This requires a remote and quiet environment, which is readily available at the South Pole, as well as a lot of transparent matter in which to detect the light — in this case, ice. IceCube scientists have already successfullyIn 2019, the U.S. National Science Foundation approved funding to upgrade the detector from 86 to 92 strings of detectors. The six new strings hold new detector modules with multiple types of photosensors in each module. It took three 10-week field sessions from 2023 to 2026 to drill more than a mile into the Antarctic ice and place the sensors. A new detector module is lowered into a hole in the ice to be installed in the underground IceCube facility. Elusive neutrinos' mass just got halved — and it could mean physicists are close to solving a major cosmic mysteryThe new sensors will allow scientists to more precisely measure properties such as neutrino oscillations, which happen when neutrinos formed byin Earth's atmosphere change into different types. This will improve their ability to measure cosmic rays and to detect neutrinos from extraplanetary sources, such as supernovas, according to the IceCube Collaboration. Researchers will also be able to better calibrate the detector retrospectively, which will allow them to refine previously collected data from the past 15 years.Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors "This upgrade will secure the nation's continued leadership in neutrino physics for years to come, paving the way for new cosmic discoveries,"Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Science history: Richard Feynman gives a fun little lecture — and dreams up an entirely new field of physics — Dec. 29, 1959
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