‘Ghost particles’ from area telescope wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics

Belgian physicist Prof Francis Halzen has received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on an observatory that detects particles from area, shedding gentle on the distant universe.

Halzen led the event of IceCube on the South Pole, which makes use of a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice fitted with gentle sensors to detect particles referred to as neutrinos. These carry details about violent, high-energy processes within the cosmos.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences mentioned “his imaginative and prescient and scientific management have been basic for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory”.

Halzen first offered his imaginative and prescient for detecting neutrinos on the South Pole in 1988.

“Francis Halzen has led a global staff of researchers and engineers who’ve offered us with a improbable instrument,” mentioned Mark Pearce, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

“His tenacity and scientific imaginative and prescient has paved the best way for a brand new type of astronomy,”

Neutrinos are elusive subatomic particles. The Solar produces huge numbers of them: each second, billions move harmlessly by way of an space the scale of your fingernail.

However IceCube is trying to find a lot higher-energy neutrinos, these produced by violent processes far past our Photo voltaic System — in distant galaxies.

Neutrinos could be considered astronomical messengers that time to these basic occasions.

On the observatory, most neutrinos move straight by way of the ice, however often one interacts with it, producing particles that give off a telltale flash of sunshine.

These uncommon indicators carry clues to the place the neutrinos got here from and the intense situations that produced them — permitting scientists to research locations that peculiar telescopes can not simply see.