Astronomy On Ice

Actually I had blogged about this topic. It's the ice cube neutrino telescope, and I wrote a little Twitter message about, Hey, I got to write about this telescope that's buried a mile beneath the ice, And immediately Nick on Twitter said you should do a podcast about that, And I thought I should do a podcast about that because I've already done the research for that thing. That's why you got this research out so quickly. Well, you know, repurposing. No, No,

it's actually here's the thing. Well one, it's buried under the ice, so already it's super cool. But I'm sorry it's already started. But I genuinely find this absolutely fascinating. I mean, it's it's the world's largest neutrino detector, it's buried a mile under the ice. It's this is something that if you had told me was in a science fiction story, I would have said, that's just silly, that's a that's a lame bond villain's layer. Yeah, there's no

way that would really exist, and it totally exists. So what is it looking for. It's looking for evidence of neutrinos, which are these massless or nearly massless particles with no electrical charge. And we'll talk more about them a little bit later. Yeah, because specifically it's looking for for interactions of neutrinos with stuff. But but well, yes, yeah, because as it turns out, neutrinos are a little tricky. But they It is at the South Pole, or really it's

underneath it. It's in Antarctica, and specifically, like I said, it's about a mile beneath the surface of the ice, between between one and two thousand meters or one to one point five miles. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. That's and it takes up about a cubic kilometer of ice, which is about two thirds of a mile on each side. So just imagine an area underneath the surface of the ice and Antarctica that is this kilometer by a kilometer by a kilometer in in in proportions, and that is

a telescope. And the reason why it's there is because well, there's a couple of reasons. One is that the ice provides a medium through which the neutrinos travel, and an exceptionally clear medium at that the pressure of the ice that deep has has pushed all the air bubbles out, right,

so it's incredibly clear. And also when you get to be about a mile down below the surface, things get a little dark, especially when sunlight isn't hitting you for what seven or eight months out of the year, right, Right, So it's already in a part of the world where, yeah, for eight months of the or you have no sun and it's a mile down and so it's really really dark. The medium it's in is really clear. And both of those things are incredibly important. So when was this thing

actually built? Well, it was proposed in yeah, but um, it wasn't actually approved as a project until May first, two thousand four. Right, They began building it in December two thousand four. They started melting the holes they would need to drill down to put the various censors that are part of this telescope. Uh, they started drilling those on on December one, two thousand four. The very last censor was placed in a December, Yes, so six years

to do a complete telescope. Now they had already started to gather information from the censors they had placed up to that point, but it wasn't until they did that last row in two thousand ten for it to be a completed project. So pretty cool. And um, we cost you know, a couple of bucks, right, easily two seventy one million, as we would say in the old days of tech stuff, a princely some most of that money

was provided by the National Science Foundation. They footed the bill for a tune of two forty two million, and the rest came from funders from all well, all around the world. Really, so it's truly an international effort. It's not something that is controlled by one entity. Uh. There's a kind of a consortium called the ice Cube Collaboration that sort of represents all the different parties involved. Right. It has a total staff of about two hundred and

fifty people from forty one institutions in twelve countries overall. Um, it's all led out of the University of Wisconsin Madison, right, and some of the institutions that are part of this include the University of Delaware. Uh. They designed some of the key elements for the project, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Clark Atlanta University. Shout out to a low cool school. Hey, how about my rival college, Georgia Tech. Uh I of course went to the University of Georgia. Georgia Tech are

are hated enemies. They were part of this as well. So we could actually we could literally go down the street and probably find someone who works work on the project, works on this project, which is kind of exciting. The Neils Bore Institute. You might have heard of us talking

about that when we did our Heisenberg episode. There's also Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Stockholm University, University of Alberta, Edmonton, University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Oxford, so among

lots of others. So, I mean, it's a it's it's a really big project and it's something that a lot of people, you know, physicists and engineers and computer science kids have been really excited to get in on exactly and when you start looking into what this telescope does and the hesitated used the word, but the scope of the project, it's it's you know, it's understandable why people are so eager to be part of it. Lauren is judging me and grinning and shaking your head. Uh So,

let's talk about what it is they're looking for. Let's talk about these neutrinos, these nearly massless particles. So there's sub atomic particles, meaning that they're smaller than actual atoms. And what's really interesting about them is is that they're they're electrically neutral, yeah, which means that they aren't affected

by electro magnetic fields or forces exactly. They they So if you were to have, say, a positively charged particle and ion flying through space, and it happened to come either close to another positively charged body, it would be repulsed by that and its direction would change, or if it came close to a negatively charged body, would be attracted to that, and again its course would change, meaning that there'd be no way for you to tell where

that particle originated from because they bounce around. Yeah, they could have been moving all over the place. It would look kind of like the old Family Circus cartoons where Billy's pathway does the little dotted line over the entire neighborhood. You just don't know where it came from. But neutrinos don't have that charge, so they're not affected by positive or negative charges. That won't change the pathway. So to you know that they're traveling in a straight line, and

they're traveling extremely fast. Because they are massless or near massless, they can travel right up nosing up to the to the speed of light right now. Obviously, if they were to travel to the speed of light, that would be a problem. According to the theory of relativity, anything with mass would require infinite energy to get to the speed of light. So it's close but not quite the speed

of light. And uh, depending upon the medium, it can actually travel faster than light within that media, not within the vacuum of space, but within the medium of say, I don't know ice. This will be important later on. Um. But but back to the basics here. Okay, So, so we think that they're the second most common particle in the entire universe, the first being photons. Right, So the fundamental unit of light is more there's more of that

than neutrinos. But that's the only thing out there besides the stuff we can't identify, like dark matter, but we'll get into that too, yes, um. And and there's there's three basic types of neutrinos or um or flavors as they are legitimately called in physics, right, which makes me just so excited. So it's vanilla chocolate and rocky road. Is that it U close electron, muon, and taw neutrinos alright, So electrons, muans and taw are all negatively charged particles.

Electrons are subatomic particles, thank you. Uh they are the electrons I would say are the most familiar to people. Everyone who has taken basic science knows the electrons the negatively charged particle that you find in atoms. They have uh energy shells that they stay in and orbit around a eight an atomic nucleus um. So you know those were familiar with. Muans and taw are a little more exotic. They are actually heavier than electrons, but they also have

a negative charge. Right, Mulons have about twice the mass of electrons, and how have almost four times the massive electrons. And now most of what we know about neutrinos really only comes from research done in the past couple of decades. But we will get to that. Yeah, well you've got a whole timeline that was actually really fascinating to me too.

Once again, it's one of those examples how people way smarter than I am are able to figure out things about the universe without ever actually seeing any proof of it, which is phenomenal with with answers to questions that we have not even thought of. Yeah, I would just think my equations must be wrong because things aren't equaling out. These are people are saying, my equations can't be wrong.

So something's going on that I don't know about. I need to invent a new particle to explain it exactly. And it turned out it works. So where do they come from? Well, from from a bunch of different places. They can come from lots of cosmological events like um like like supernova more or even the Sun. Okay, so so you know weak stuff, right, this little low power now obviously black holes, no big yeah, exactly, little stuff, you know, just the things that can rip a galaxy apart. Yeah.

It turns out that neutrinos can be generated lots of

different ways. But the ones that we are particularly interested in are these high energy neutrinos that would be so high energy as to be it would be impossible for them to have originated in our solar system, right, because we can detect the neutrinos that come to us courtesy of the Sun or the ones that are formed within the Earth's atmosphere, but the more elusive ones are neutrinos that might come from a cosmological event that happened on the other side of the galaxy millions of years ago.

Well and and those those larger events create vastly more neutrinos than say, the Sun would create on any given day. But since the Sun is so much closer to us, we're basically in and did with with neutrinos from the Sun, Electron neutrinos specifically um as a byproduct of the nuclear fusion that goes on in in the sun where uh you know, if you if you hold up your hand to sunlight, billions of neutrinos passed through it in a

single second. Yeah. Now, remember, because these are sub atomic particles and they have no mass, these things, they're so small and they're moving so quickly, they can pass right through what would appear to be completely solid matter. Because I don't know if you know this or not, solid matter still has gaps in it at the atomic level, and so a neutrino can pass right through that, right through the Earth, and in fact, billions do every single day.

So being able to detect these these neutrinos that came from cosmological events would tell us more about our universe, which is why we're so interested in them. All Right, So we've already talked a little bit about how neutrinos behave They aren't affected by electrical charge, they move nearly

at the speed of light. And the nice thing is is that if we detect a neutrino and we're able to observe the effects that the neutrino has had on other atomic particles, then we can draw some information about that neutrino, for example, where it may have come from and how powerful it was. And so that is why we're looking at the cosmological ones versus the ones that we would say are emanating from our son um because

they are so they're they're nearly massless. They're also barely affected by gravity, so because that's one thing that things with mass do get affected by his gravity. But gravity, out of the four fundamental forces of the universe, is the weakest, right, So the only real force that tends to affect neutrinos is the weak atomic force, but that only takes effect at incredibly short distances. We're talking on the atomic scale. So this is the kind of stuff

that holds atoms together. And so unless you're unless you're is close to and I forget the exact distances that we're that we're talking about here, but it's it's it's like, yeah, as close as you can possibly get without being the same thing pretty much plunk is what we're talking about here. Uh, incredibly short distances. So you know, otherwise they just like I said, our fly through uh uninhibited. They just go

straight in a straight line. So by seeing the direction that they traveled in through the evidence they leave, which we'll talk about in a second, then we can determine where they came from. And and if we are able to measure how much energy there was in that neutrino, then that can give us an idea of what might

have eventually spawned it. For example, if we are able to see what direction it came from and we figure it was pretty powerful and we end up kind of tracing back that pathway and we see that that pathway takes it through to what used to be a supernova, you could potentially say, hey, this neutrino was uh, it came to us from that supernova. That's pretty phenomenal stuff. That means we can learn more about a thing that happens in our universe that otherwise we would never be

close enough to observe. Pretty mysterious. Yeah, you know, Unfortunately, since they don't interact with matter all that much. You know, you know, there's for for about every hundred billion neutrinos that paths of the Earth, only one or so is going to interact with anything. And since it's really the interactions with stuff that we're looking for, not the neutrinos themselves, that that is part of why they are a so elusive and be so attractive as a field of scientific study.

And exactly, and that's also an explanation of why the ice cube telescope is so enormous. If you were to create a human sized neutrino detector, it would take you a century before you would be likely to detect a neutrino, Whereas if you make it a cubic kilometer, you have increased your odds of that happening, uh like, quite a bit, as it turns out, yea, by more than two. So when did we first figure out that there were these things, or at least suspect that they existed that That first

suspicion was in nineteen one. Um. That was theorist Wolfgang Polly. Yeah, he was looking at some radioactive decay equations and saw that there was some missing energy and energy k be created or destroyed. Right, So he figured there has to be something responsible for this, and and therefore there there has to be a particle that's being given off. There's some undetectable particle that is making off with some of

this energy. It must be an electrically neutral right and yeah, so he figured out the basics of what must have been there, but had no way of detecting it. And uh, you know, this is again something that sounds phenomenal to me. I can't imagine coming up with this conclusion. But if you look at particle physics, this is a story that we see happen over and over again, where people see something, they theorize or hypothesize what must be happening, and then

future experiments end up bearing that out right. Um. Now, the term neutrino wasn't coined until ninety four by by Enrico Fermi. Oh for me, we've talked about for me before. Yeah, so neutrino is an Italian word, and I think it means enormous pasta dish, little neutral one, I think is the more common translation. Well, I was using poetic license. Uh yeah, so it's you know, it was it still had not been actually seen or observed, right right, Um, but this this was just a kind of formal equation

that he was using that incorporated Polly's ideas. Right, So you have to skip from nineteen thirty four all the way to nineteen fifty nine before you get to some scientists who observed a new trino, and that would be Clyde Cowen and Fred Rens, who discovered a particle that fit all the expected characteristics of what was being called the new trino. So now it was no longer hypothetical. Now they actually had a particle they could point to and say, that's it. This thing that we found in

the lab, that thing is probably a neutrino UM. And specifically what they found was an electron neutrino, which is UM. And I think that we forgot to explain this part earlier. But the three different kinds of neutrinos pair with three different kinds of particles, so it's the electron neutrinos pair with electrons, right, and muon neutrinos pair with muan, so they're heavier, they have more mass. You guys tell us the tal neutrinos are a little heavier than the muans.

So yeah, each new trino has a mass that is equivalent, well not not equivalent. It matches in a sense the size of the other subatomic particle, because actually a an electron new trino has less mass than an electronic way less mass, but but they scale up as the negatively charged subatomic particles scale up as well. So I don't mean to suggest that an electron and electron new trino are equivalent in the sense of mass. They are not.

But now we get up to nineteen sixty two when another UH organization we're familiar with CERN along with the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Yet they independently conducted experiments and discovered a second type of neutrino, which was the muon neutrino,

and it behaved differently from the electron neutrino. That's what first gave them a little bit of confusion, in fact, to a point where they would expect to observe a certain number of neutrinos coming from the Sun on any given day, and they had a certain number that they expected for electron neutrinos and a certain number for muon neutrinos, and for some reason that wasn't working out, and they could not figure out why that was, and they couldn't figure out why that was for a long time, very

long time. So you have the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and they discovered the twel subatomic particle, which was the negatively charged sub atomic particle that's heavier than electron or muan, and that led the scientist to hypothesize that perhaps there was in fact a third type of neutrino, because there already were neutrino counterparts for the other two negative lee charged particles. So now they had the new the tow new trino um, but they could not directly observe it.

And at that point they were still kind of wondering why there seems to be this new trino shortage, you know, based upon their calculations, there should be more than what they were detecting. Yeah, like like twice again as much, right, And then we get up to in nine seven, an enormous newtrino detector is built, the Cameo conde, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that newtrino detector. It was a large water detector, not meaning that I don't mean that it

was detecting large amounts of water. I meant that it had a large amount of water and that used as the detector. Now, this water was incredibly pure and incredibly clear, so clear that sunlight could pass through it without slowing down for something like seventy meters, which is far longer than it could if it were passing through the water

of say, your typical swimming pool. Yeah, in in your typical swimming pool, you might get a couple of meters if you're lucky, right, So it was very very clear, and that was important to detect these tiny little reactions that the neutrino would cause if it collided with another

sub atomic particle. And it also had more than eleven thousand light collectors that were called photo multiplier tubes in the water itself, and those were what we're looking for, these these reactions that we're going to talk about in the second So that was a huge advance. It was an enormous neutrino detector, one of the largest until the

ice cube one comes along. Certain starts to experiment and determine that no other types of neutrinos beyond the three types that already been identified could exist based upon what we know. So maybe one day we'll find out we're wrong about that, but based upon everything we know right now, it appears that only those three types of neutrinos, the electron, muan,

and tao, are the ones that exist. UM now in two thousand one was that was when we finally solved that solar neutrino problem that we were talking about earlier.

UM experiments that were conducted at the Canadian Solar Neutrino Observatory or snow UM showed because it's in Canada, there's anyway showed that it could be solved with the explanation that okay, So so even though the Sun releases only electron neutrinos, they oscillate sometimes while they travel through space to become a pretty even mix of muan, tao, and electron neutrinos, So that that explains like if they're oscillating and some of them are town neutrinos, which we have

not been able to observe directly, that would that would explain the apparent shortage of neutrinos right, previous experiments. Most previous experiments were really only looking for electron neutrinos, especially coming from the Sun, and the instruments were not calibrated to be detecting Muon and tao. So, and that's because if it's if it's oscillating, it has to have mass. It's one of those things fundamental nature. Yeah, so you know,

they're still really tiny. An electron neutrino would be about one one million the mass of an electron. Yeah, that's that's incredibly that's inconceivably tiny, at least in my mind. But but something so inconceivably tiny is very important on a universal level because this could possibly explain why, uh, why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. Why we think that this could explain dark matter basically exactly. It could well, when you get to why more matter than

antimatter that explained. That would explain why the universe is the way it is, because if there had been an equal amount of matter and antimatter, it would have all annihilated itself and we wouldn't have a universe, which would be terrible because that's where I keep all my stuff. Now, how do we actually create neutrinos ourselves. Well, it's mostly through particle accelerators. You know, you moved some subatomic particles

fast enough and smash them to see what happens. And some of the stuff that gets spun off tends to be these other subatomic particles and energy that we would otherwise not have been able to observe, and neutrinos are

one of those. Although again we don't directly observe the neutrinos, we observe the reactions that they have with other stuff, right, And these neutrinos that we can create here on Earth are much lower in energy than most of the ones that we're seeing from from from the Sun, and way lower than anything that would be produced from a cosmological event.

So yeah, if you compare the neutrinos from the ones that have been detected at the ice cube detector versus the ones that have been created in the lab, it's worlds of difference. So we've got a lot more we want to talk about with the ice cube detector, including how it actually detects these new trinos, or at least the interactions and the neutrinos are having with other particles. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, let's get back into

the discussion about as cube. What is this thing actually made of? Okay, so we've talked about there are these sensors that are buried a mile beneath the ice, but what are the sensors actually Well, first of all, I like your verbal suggestion that we are talking in fact about the rapper ice cube. Well, but what was that? Not it? Man? The second half of this episode is

going to be so confusing. Okay, that the main components of of ice cube are these these digital optical modules or doms, and each one is about the size of a basketball and they are specifically looking for a very um peculiar kind of light. And I'll talk more about that in the second but you know now they are deep within the ice. That means that we can't really fix them if something goes wrong. Yeah, there's really no diving down into a mile of ice to fix the

wet dom. Number four hundred and seventy three is on the fritz. C oll. We can actually we being the people who are actually working on and no, we're not giving access to this sort of thing but they can make software updates and firmware updates. Each one of those doms is wired to the headquarters, which is at the South Pole. Uh. The South Pole headquarters houses lots of

different stuff, not just the ice cube project. There are other projects that are at the South Pole as well, but that's one of the ones, and they're all wired in there so that you can administer commands to the doms and update their software as needed. So there are a few of them. There's actually sixty uh doms per hole, and there are holes if we do a little bit of math, that comes up with about five thousand, one

hundred sixty of these things. Uh. These holes were drilled by UM by shooting hot, pressurized water down into the ice, which then froze back over UM through a very careful engineering process, into that very clear ice that we were looking for. Right. Yeah, I'll have to, uh see if I can find some photos that we can link to, because the photos of these holes where they just they shot a picture straight down the whole after it was drilled,

is vertigo inducing. It's pretty amazing stuff to be looking down a a you know, a perfect circle that goes down a mile. It reminded me very much of all the things that I didn't want to jump down into in silent hill too, that having to jump down into. Now on top of the literally on top of these five thousand one sixty doms on the surface of the ice itself are an additional three twenty four digital operating modules, and that is part of a second detector called ice top.

So you have the five thousand one or sixty underneath the surface and three four on the surface, all of which are looking for these new trino interactions. Okay, so how exactly are are they looking for these interactions? All right? So when a new trino meets another sub atomic particle that really likes it's traveling at a pretty high amount of energy, uh, you tend to have a mouon emitted as part of this interaction, and it's going to be

moving in the same direction as the neutrino. So, when a neutrino makes contact with a subatomic particle in the ice, within an ice molecule, uh, a muan is given off and that ends up producing something called cheren CoV radiation. Now, cheren CoV radiation is emitted whenever a particle moves through a medium faster than light. Could move through that same medium. So in this case, the neutrino is moving through that ice faster than light could travel through that ice, and

it makes contact with the subatomic particle. You end up having this MoU on uh given off as a result, and you get this light blue radiation. This is typical of any kind of nuclear radioactive process. You get this

blue glow as a result. So what these detectors are looking for is evidence of that blue glow, and when they detect it, they record it and then it's measured, so you can it an entire track of this through the the kilometer of ice and find out where it came from and get an idea from the intensity of the light how much energy that neutrino had. So you're looking at the direction of the light and the intensity of it to infer the information about this subatomic particle,

which is awesome. I just think that's so amazing that you can learn so much from just a pattern of light. And uh, it really is a lot. It's a ton of light uh and ton of information that they are gathering each year, something like a terabyte of data per day that they're gathering. Uh. The ends up being just about a hundred gigabytes but all the time they're done with this. Yeah it's tiny, tiny, but yeah, hundred gigabytes once they filter through all the data. But uh, that's

exactly what they're looking for. And that's why these detectors have to be so far underground in such dark, clear conditions for it to be able to detect this of these very small little packets of life that are just yeah, it happens in an instant and they are so faint that if it were not that dark, you would never be able to detect it. So that's the that's the

whole purpose of this thing. And because neutrinos are given off by lots of stuff besides just the Sun or by particle accelerators, we can if we detect the right types, learn more about stuff like cosmic rays, gamma ray bursts, supernova um We might also be able to start to infer things about dark matter and dark energy, things that we do not We we know have to exist based upon our understanding of our universe, but we have no evidence.

But again, yeah, right now, they're really just just mathematical placeholders, right, yeah, Because when I say we have no evidence for it, we have no direct evidence. We have lots of indirect evidence by the way that the universe behaves, and the way it behaves is different from how we would understand it based upon the matter and energy we are able to observe. So this might be able to give us more clues about that and learn more about our our universe.

Pretty cool stuff. So, like we said, it's gathering lots of information every single day. It's already detected several interesting neutrinos. In May two thousand thirteen, they reported that they had detected twenty eight neutrinos that had higher energy levels than what they would expect from any neutrinos that would be omitted by the Sun or any other nearby system within our solar system. So it must be that these came from outside the Solar system, assuming everything else is correct,

which is incredibly exciting. In fact, two of them had so much high energy that they broke all records of all neutrinos ever detected, and they got nicknames they got

They were nicknamed Bertie, Bert and Ernie. So yeah, I assume one of them has an affinity for rubber duckies and the other one is a neat freak, So yeah, It's really exciting though, that these could possibly have come from outside our solar system and could be evidence for something that happened light years away, millions of years ago. That's that's incredible. So we're still waiting to hear more about that. As of the recording of this podcast, there

are plenty of scientists still poring over this information. Of course, scientists are very careful before saying definitively whether or not something came from outside the solar system. That seems to be the indication, but they won't want to. I don't want to jump to conclusions. You don't want to have another Hey, the voyager left the solar system. No, wait, no it didn't. No, no, it totally did. No it didn't. Okay,

it did, but it did it a year ago. We don't want another one of those, right, No, no, no. I I think it's much preferable in the scientific community to be like, we're not sure about this thing, then like we're sure. Oh we're wrong. Yeah. So this is what we call exploratory science in the sense that there's not like a specific practical application, there's no particular end goal.

It's just learning for the sake of learning, which is invaluable because even though I mean there there are some philosophies that say that science needs to be goal oriented, like there needs to be an actual practical goal to whatever scientific exploration you're doing. But that kind of puts blinders on, right, because just by learning stuff, you never

know what kind of useful applications can come out of that. Yeah, people hadn't been studying sub atomic particles, we would never have come up with transistors, right, So, yeah, you can't predict what sort of world changing discoveries can come out

of exploratory science. So personally, I find this to be an absolutely fascinating use of resources to learn more about our universe, and you never know how that information is going to play out in ways that we just can't anticipate right now, right, So I think it's pretty darn awesome. But but more practically, what what exactly is it like living and working? You know the South Pole. Yeah, there's a great with a giant ice telescope. I have to give a shout out. The ice cube website is fantastic.

It's tons of information and a lot of great video interviews. Oh yeah, yes, so it is highly recommended. You'll have to go and check it out. But one of the sections is about what's it like at the South Pole? So first of all, it describes what your experience would be like just to get to the South Pole. Because first, assuming you don't live in New Zealand or Australia, you've got a little bit of a trip ahead of you. Yeah. Well, I mean first you need to be issued some clothing

that will keep you from freezing to death. Yeah. That that you can probably pick up somewhere in New Zealand. Maybe you know, because they're the that's the only way to get from UH at least by air to the antar to the Antarctic. I mean you could go by boat, but still you would have to pick up a lot

of clothing to keep you from freezing. Um. So yeah, you would fly to Australia, fly to New Zealand get all this clothing because you want to keep all your fingers and toes and your nose, and I actually do. I don't want to speak for all of humanity. Okay, that's fair, that's fair, um, but so many of you would like to keep your fingers and toes. From New Zealand, you bought a military transport to the U S Station McMurdo. Oh, not just a military transport, a Lockheed Hercules, Lauren, we

just talked about those, we did. Yeah, it's a Lockheed Hercules military transport that you would board. Clearly not one of the ones that the CIA is operating. Probably, yeah, question as far as you know, uh if it if it has you know, non standard Lockheed Hercules equipment on it,

maybe it's one of the CIA ones. But anyway, Yeah, that takes you to to McMurdo, which is on the coast of Antarctica, and from there you would have to wait for a while, um and get another flight out to the South Pole where you would land, walk outside and immediately shield your eyes on ski Yes, that's my favorite part. Honestly. For some reason, landing on skis just makes me incredibly happy. Yeah, this Hercules has skis instead of wheels, because you know, you can not so useful

in the Antarctic. So that South Pole station has two people in it, um, only only about fifty of those would be during during the height of study. During any given year through the winter, about fifty people are are going to be stationed right right, and only a couple are there year round. Like stay for the full year and uh and so it has h it's got a couple of amenities. It's got a kitchen, it's got a gym, it's got greenhouse, dining room. Uh. So it's got actually

meeting rooms and things like that. They have a lot of extracurricular activities for people, so they don't go snow crazy. Is that is that the scientific term? I would call it that. If you will watch the Shining, I would call that snow crazy. They don't want any Jack torrans is running around the South Pole, so so they don't have a lot of topiary in the greens. I'm guessing no hedge mazes over at the South Pole, but they do. They do have lots of different lectures you can attend.

Apparently the people will show up and find out that they have complementary musical skills and a lot of bands end up forming at the South Pole. Um. You know, it's it's kind of interesting stuff and there's I was. I was actually very much entertained. I love the idea one of the things that you could take classes and totally nonrelated things like lately unscientific like Scottish dance that I just love the idea of all these scientists doing

a Scottish Highland dance in the South Pole. Yeah, parkas and lab coats. So it did say that things like preparing food at the South Pole is a little different from other places in the world because it can take anywhere from several hours to like a couple of weeks. Yeah. They said that if you wanted to, say, serve ice cream, you would take it out of the freezer and let's sit out for no half a day or else you would need a hack saw to uh to make us serving.

So I thought that was pretty interesting too. They have lots of educational outreach programs to various high schools and colleges throughout the world, and uh, they have programs where schools can have someone talk to them about the project via webcast or even come in. Yeah. Yeah, because not that all these scientists are working at the South Pole. Some of them are working remotely. They get the data sent up to them via satellite and then they work

on that. But they're still doing very important work in in the whole experiment, and they can talk at length about what it is they do and why it's important. So lots of schools if your school is interested in that sort of thing, go to the ice Cube website. You can totally check it out there. And if your school has high aspirations and and a high budget, yeah, they can actually look into paying a visit to the South Pole headquarters and finding out more about the ice

Cube detector. I think paying is probably the operative word, because it is expensive to Antarctica, you know, I noticed I saw that between for an average person, if you're just talking about a tour, you're not even talking about going down to the South Pole to see the headquarters, just just to look at Antarctica, can be between four thousand and eleven thousand dollars per person, so it is a bit dear. However, I think you know, it's a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity, right except for

the people who live there where it's every day. But for most of us, it's a once in a lifetime type thing. So I think it would be absolutely cool to go visit it. To bring things back around again, Lauren, you can't really start or endo tech stuff episode without having you judge me, so we have to you already, you already did that pun. You should come up with some fresh new puns. Flash freeze waters, look, stop, collaborate and listen. Ice is back with a brand new invention.

Al Right, guys, that wraps up this topic. Thank you, thank you. It's time to go solo. No, not really, not really. Alright, guys, if you enjoyed this episode, or maybe you have something you want to add to the discussion, perhaps about particle physics, or maybe it's just that there's another related topic you've always wanted to hear about, or maybe it's something we just never ever mentioned right to us.

Let us know what you think. Text stuff at Discovery dot com is our email address, and you can also let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or tumbler. We are a tech stuff hs W at all three of those, and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it has stuff works dot com