Daily News | South Pole observatory reveals hidden view of the Milky Way with help from Drexel physicists
A team of more than 350 scientists said Thursday they had revealed a hidden view of the Milky Way, using an array of high-tech sensors buried in ice at the South Pole.
The findings will help answer fundamental questions about high-energy physics, as neutrinos are created by violent, outer-space collisions that cannot be reproduced with experiments on Earth, said team member Steve Sclafani, a former Drexel graduate student now at the University of Maryland. Other area participants in the project included scientists from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Delaware. The latter helped build a component of the IceCubeWhile most of the Drexel team’s work was done on campus in West Philadelphia, Kurahashi Neilson and Sclafani both also traveledFor the first leg of the journey, visitors fly to the Antarctic Coast. Then, because there are no runways at the South Pole, they switch to a special aircraft fitted with skis.
“I’m not like this rugged explorer type,” she said. “I’m like the wimpiest person ever to go to this extreme environment.”“It’s kind of an alien environment,” he said.The South Pole faces the center of the Milky Way, making it a prime location for viewing the galaxy with the naked eye.Sclafani used the machine learning algorithm to sift through millions of “events” detected by the IceCube sensors, most of them background noise.
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