There is plenty of interesting stuff going on at the South Pole. The atmosphere, the uninterrupted periods of darkness, the weather and the deep clear ice all make this ice cap a perfect place to spy on Universe. 

The research station browse the sky for distant planets, brown dwarfs, Gamma rays, Blazars  (active galactic nuclear with a jet pointing at the observer), dark matter and background noise created by the Big Bang.

Among all the instruments used at the pole, our favorite is the Amanda.



Amanda

…"There are so many different worlds, so many different songs, and we have just begun"…
                                                                                    (Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits)

The Amanda telescope is looking straight for the birth of Universe. Amazingly enough, her initial reports indicate that we are just at the beginning of it all.

The telescope is actually a carpet, or a cone, of  glass bulbs (Optical modules/Oms) each the size of a bowling ball, frozen deep into the ice. 

The glass protect the detectors inside from the surrounding ice pressure. Holes are drilled with the aid of hot water almost 2 km deep. The glass balls are then deployed into the ice attached to each other by strings of  electrical wire and optic fiber.  A couple of days later, it all refreeze and we are in business.



Blue breath of birth

The glass modules  work like light bulbs in reverse, capturing the faint and fleeting streaks of blue light (Cerenkov light) created when the occasional neutrino crashes head on into another particle such as a proton. 

The subatomic wreck creates a muon, another subatomic particle that, conveniently, traces an ephemeral trail of the blue light through the ice identical to the path of the neutrino. In theory, that trail can be used to point back to the neutrino's point of origin.  

All the way back to Big Bang, perhaps. We know approximately how it might have happened. Now we´ll  also know when it happened, and where! The "why" however, you figure out! 



Violent gasps of battle   

The streaks provide a view of some of the most distant, enigmatic and violent phenomena in the universe. The neutrinos captured by Amanda are of a higher energy than has been seen before. 

To be able to detect high-energy neutrinos and follow their trails back to their points of origin promises unparalleled insight into extraordinary things.
 
Cosmic neutrinos are believed to be generated in the universe's most violent events - exploding stars and active galactic nuclei, extremely violent and not-at-all understood phenomena at the heart of many galaxies.

"Of all high-energy particles, only neutrinos can directly convey astronomical information from the edge of the universe," notes Robert Morse, a UW-Madison professor of physics and the principal investigator for the AMANDA project.

How about that for a bad breath filter - and besides - look down!

Since neutrinos can and do skip through the Earth continuously, it is the logical direction to point the telescope downwards in order to filter out other, confusing high-energy events. 

The Earth between the detector at the South Pole and the northern sky filters out everything but neutrinos.  Thus the Amanda telescope at the South Pole studies the northern hemisphere!

The ice at the South Pole has proved incredibly clear. 800 meters down  the vision is up to several hundred of meters. Below 1500 meters, the ice is bubble free. 

The AMANDA telescope array consists of 677 optical modules, each the size of a bowling ball, arrayed on electrical cables, arranged in a cylinder 500 meters in height and 120 meters in diameter, with an effective telescope area of order 10,000 meter squared.


ICE CUBE: The Future 

Plans are being made to construct a much larger detector know as Ice Cube. To consist of 4,800 optical modules on 80 strings, the Ice Cube detector would effectively convert a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into the world's largest scientific instrument. 

This high energy neutrino telescope would have an effective area of order 1 square kilometer in order to detect neutrino emission from the most energetic cosmic processes involving pulsars, black holes, active galactic nuclei and the like. Such an instrument also has unique capabilities in searching for neutrino mass and dark matter. 



Antares

The popular Amanda now has got a boyfriend. He is the handsome French Antares, lurking deep in the ocean. Check him out! 
http://antares.in2p3.fr/



Sources and more on Amanda:
http://whyfiles.org/004antarctic/2antarctic4.html
www.Aas.org
www.news.wisc.edu/releases/view.html?id=5950&month=Mar&year=2001
/www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/amanda.html