It came from outer space

Christopher Reeve's 1980 Superman in his Fortress of Solitude

Personally speaking - the viewpoint on a non-astrophysicist - the themes of this blog post sound like the origin story for a 1960’s superhero: cosmic rays, neutrinos, gamma rays, and of course, IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a crazy array of sensors in Antarctica located under a kilometer of ice. Isn’t that where Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is hidden?

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I can’t possibly cover (understand) the full scope of Marcos Santander’s work, but his team - Robyn, Emma, and Steven - are doing some very cool stuff. What you need to know is what scientists don’t know: Namely, what is the source of cosmic rays (nuclei or other high energy sub-atomic particles traveling near the speed of light through space)? So, the team’s project is pretty straightforward. Find the source of cosmic rays and thereby solve a long-standing mystery in astrophysics.

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So how does the search go down? As cosmic rays travel through space, they interact with gas and produce particles that decay into gamma rays (super high energy electromagnetic radiation) and neutrinos (subatomic particles). The Fortress of Solitude, err, I mean IceCube can detect neutrinos (not sure how, but let’s leave that for next time). In addition to IceCube's observations, Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope measures information about gamma rays. Do you see where this is going? If you can map and correlate positions of gamma rays and neutrinos, you may find what in the universe is making this stuff. A supermassive black hole? A supernova?

Photon counts map . . . a map of the positions of each detected gamma-ray in the sky. The color represents the number of gamma rays per pixel in the map, so most pixels have either 1 or 0 events

Will Marcos and his team of young, mad scientists discover the source of cosmic rays? Will they solve one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics before SRMP graduation? Tune in tomorrow (June) to find out.