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Research Paper On Breaking Cosmic Ice

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Breaking the Cosmic Ice

Scientists have shown that the Earth stops energetic neutrinos, according to data collected from the IceCube array in Antarctica. High-energy neutrino interactions monitored by the IceCube detector, an array of 5,160 basketball-sized optical sensors buried a mile deep in a cubic kilometer of exceptionally-clear ice near the south pole.

Neutrinos are infinitesimally small and nearly massless particles that surround us at any given moment. Roughly one trillion from the Sun pass through a human's eyes every second, and they come in three types (called flavors): electron, muon, and tauon neutrinos, each name corresponding to three charged particles with which they pair. Since they interact so rarely, it's extremely …show more content…

The neutrino-interactions analyzed have energies in the trillion-electron-volt, or TeV, range. A mosquito puts out about one TeV. The detected neutrinos' energy ranged from 6.3 TeV to 980 TeV.

Miarecki performed much of the data analysis whilst working toward her PhD as an IceCube researcher. "It's a multidisciplinary idea," she said in a news release. In order to understand if the cross section of neutrinos detected matches Standard Model predictions, the analysis used input from geologists who supplied models of the Earth's interior from seismic studies. With this, scientists were able to compare their data with a simulation of neutrinos passing through the Earth.

In this study, researchers measured the flux of muon neutrinos as a function of their energy and their incoming direction. Neutrinos with higher energies and with incoming directions closer to the North Pole are more likely to interact with matter on their way through Earth. Image credit: IceCube Collaboration
"We created some of the data from seismic data bouncing off of various parts of the Earth," Miarecki told Futurism. "Putting together all the constraints, including the gravitational constriction of the Earth, and you have a good model," she added. The bulk of detected neutrinos mass around the lower range, with the high-energy neutrinos growing scarce until the frequency of their occurrence passes beyond the

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