Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
Inside, there is a photomultiplier tube sensitive enough to detect even a single photon, along with various components that amplify the signal and convert it into digital data, which is then transmitted up the cables to the surface.
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And with so many detectors making up this three-dimensional array, there is a lot of data.
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A whole terabyte of measurements are captured every day, with hundreds of gigabytes of that being beamed by satellite to scientists across the planet for them to comb through in search of their ghostly quantum target.
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Within this trove of data lie the imprints of many particles arriving from beyond our
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The vast majority are cosmic rays.
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IceCube detects around 275 million of them daily.
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Cosmic rays are interesting in their own right, but serve as an obscuring curtain of noise to those seeking neutrino interactions, which occur a million times less frequently, with only around 275 detected daily.
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But even with the 100,000 neutrino detections that IceCube makes each year, almost all of them are generated in our own atmosphere as debris from collisions of cosmic rays with atoms in the gas that surrounds our planet, and not from cosmic origins themselves.
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The key word here being almost.
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On the 22nd of September 2017, an exceptionally bright burst of Cherenkov radiation was registered by IceCube's array of detectors.
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Working together, the doms used the tiny time differences between when they each detected the flash to trace the path of the muon.
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and the exceptionally energetic neutrino that created it, all the way back to a powerful and mysterious cosmic source out in the depths of our universe.
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A blazar, a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy, hurling jets of particles towards Earth.
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This discovery was monumental.
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It was not the first time that IceCube had detected neutrinos from deep, deep space, but this detection was the first to trigger a real-time alert to telescopes across the globe, indicating that there was something significant to look at in that direction.
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IceCube and neutrinos had entered the world of multi-messenger astronomy, where the cosmos is studied through not just light, like it has been for most of the history of astronomy, but also gravitational waves, cosmic rays, and now neutrinos.
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Neutrinos are a particularly useful window for us to look through, because, like gravitational waves, they can arrive at us before the light from a major astronomical event does.
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Because of their ghostly nature that I talked about before, neutrinos take a very direct path to our detector, whereas light faces many obstacles like dust and magnetic fields that interfere with its journey and slow it down.
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IceCube is now fully integrated into a planetary network of observatories, constantly scouring the skies for signs of high-energy events, ready to inform radio dishes, mirrors and lenses precisely where to point to see rare and transient phenomena that we would otherwise miss completely.
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IceCube is the noble watchman, sounding the alarm to rally an army of telescopic troops across the globe, commanding them where to aim to catch sight of raging cosmic fires.
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Showing 1981–2000 of 29,301 · page 100 of 1466
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