25 articles tagged with IceCube.
A tidal disruption event happens when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole and gets pulled apart. The aftermath blazes in light for months — and, in a small but growing number of cases, IceCube has caught neutrinos coincident in time and direction with the optical flare. This is one of the freshest chapters in neutrino astronomy.
Black holes trap light — so a natural question is whether they trap neutrinos too. The honest answer has two halves: from inside the event horizon, no. From the violent environments around black holes, very much yes — and astronomers are now catching those neutrinos at IceCube.
A decade after the first IceCube astrophysical detections, neutrino alerts have become a routine part of the global multi-messenger response. Here is how the system works in 2026 — who sends, who receives, what counts as a follow-up — and where neutrinos sit alongside photons and gravitational waves.
For the first time, humanity has seen its own galaxy in neutrinos. IceCube's 2023 announcement: a diffuse glow of cosmic neutrinos tracing the galactic disk at 4.5σ significance.
A statistical analysis of 10 years of IceCube data revealed NGC 1068 — a relatively nearby Seyfert galaxy whose jet is not aimed at us — as the second identified extragalactic neutrino source.
Two PeV-scale neutrino cascades detected by IceCube in 2012 established cosmic high-energy neutrinos as a real astrophysical phenomenon.
Why neutrinos are the most informative messenger of all — and the hardest to catch. What they can tell us that photons and gravitational waves cannot.
How astrophysical neutrinos with TeV to PeV energies trace the extreme accelerators of the universe — and how IceCube made cosmic neutrino astronomy a working science.
How IceCube turned a cubic kilometer of glacial ice into the world's most sensitive high-energy neutrino telescope.
Part 5 of a six-part chronological history. Daya Bay and RENO pin down the smallest mixing angle. IceCube finds astrophysical neutrinos. TXS 0506+056 becomes the first identified extragalactic source. The 2015 Nobel arrives.
In 1960, Sheldon Glashow predicted that electron antineutrinos at exactly 6.3 PeV should annihilate with electrons through a W boson resonance. Sixty-one years later, IceCube caught one.
In 2022, IceCube identified a nearby Seyfert galaxy as the second confirmed point source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos — and the first one that emits a steady glow rather than a transient flare.
At about 3 PeV of cosmic-ray energy, the spectrum of particles arriving at Earth steepens noticeably. The kink is called the 'knee.' It probably marks the upper limit of what our own galaxy's accelerators can produce — and therefore the upper limit on neutrinos of galactic origin.
In September 2017, IceCube caught a 300-TeV neutrino arriving from a specific spot in the sky. Within hours, telescopes around the world traced it back to a flaring blazar four billion light-years away.
After ten years of cosmic neutrino measurements, IceCube produced the first observation of neutrinos coming from our own Milky Way — a diffuse galactic glow at energies a million times higher than any star can produce.
Neutrinos interact only via the weak nuclear force, which is extraordinarily feeble at low energies. An average neutrino could pass through a light-year of solid lead before being stopped — so we need very large detectors and a lot of patience.
Solar neutrinos come from fusion in our own Sun at MeV energies; cosmic neutrinos come from distant accelerators across the universe at TeV-to-PeV energies. The same particle, vastly different sources and roles.
Everything that happened in neutrino physics in 2025 — KATRIN tightening the mass limit, DESI sharpening the cosmology tension, JUNO completing commissioning, SBND first data, IceCube galactic-plane confirmation, LEGEND-200 results, and the field's state going into 2026.
The biennial Neutrino conference ran in Milan in June 2024, with 1,200 physicists presenting two years of results. The headlines: T2K and NOvA preferring different δ_CP values, KATRIN tightening the mass limit toward 0.45 eV, JUNO entering the final commissioning phase, and the first hints of new tau-neutrino signatures at IceCube.
Super-Kamiokande is a 50-kiloton water tank built for MeV solar and GeV atmospheric neutrinos. IceCube is a cubic-kilometre array in Antarctic ice built for TeV-to-PeV cosmic neutrinos. Same idea, opposite ends of the energy spectrum.
Not directly — but we can see the secondary particles a neutrino produces when it occasionally interacts with matter. Detectors like IceCube and Super-Kamiokande catch the resulting flash of Cherenkov light or scintillation.
When a charged particle moves through a medium faster than light can, it emits a faint cone of blue light. That light is how IceCube, Super-Kamiokande, and KM3NeT detect neutrinos.
In April 2013, the IceCube collaboration announced two extraordinarily energetic neutrinos, nicknamed after Sesame Street characters. They were the first cosmic neutrinos ever caught — and the start of high-energy neutrino astronomy.
Two and a half kilometers under the Antarctic surface, an unlikely telescope listens for blue flashes from the edge of the universe. A look at how it actually works.
When a single high-energy neutrino was traced back to a faraway flaring galaxy in 2017, it opened a new way of looking at the universe. Here's where that story stands today.
