A New Look at the Milky Way

ICECUBE COLLABORATION/U.S. NSF

Here’s a filter you won’t find on your phone: the UW’s IceCube project used a neutrino lens to take a picture of the Milky Way. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are nearly impossible to detect — they have almost no mass and barely react to any other matter. The UW-sponsored IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses thousands of sensors distributed over a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole to try to “see” neutrinos. The work of IceCube scientists led to this image of our home galaxy, which, they found, produces fewer neutrinos than expected.

Published in the Winter 2023 issue