Cold Skies

It’s early in the long winter night at the south pole. But a few dozen scientists and others have settled in at a research base there. They monitor the weather and climate, listen to rumbles in the ice below, and watch auroras dancing in the dark skies above. And they operate observatories that study the universe beyond. One of those observatories is buried in the ice. Known as IceCube, it’s a set of thousands of light detectors. They look for evidence of neutrinos – particles that are produced in the Sun, exploding stars, and other powerful objects and events. They almost never interact with other matter. But when one does interact, by smashing into an ice molecule, it produces a quick flash of light. Studying that flicker reveals details about the neutrino, including its origin. And that tells scientists more about the body that created it. Another observatory, the South Pole Telescope, studies the “afterglow” of the Big Bang. Known as the cosmic microwave background, it’s a sort of “haze” that fills the entire universe. Tiny fluctuations in the haze reveal details about the birth of the first stars and galaxies. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs microwaves. But the south pole is almost two miles high, and it’s so cold that there’s almost no water vapor in the skies above it. That allows the 10-meter dish to study the background glow in great detail – under the clear, dark skies at the bottom of the world. Script by Damond Benningfield