“This ice is fantastically clear,” says Halzen. “In our detector the blue light travels over 100 meters [328 feet].”
Burying IceCube this way requires a lot of work, but Halzen says the science it will deliver is worth the effort. For scientists like Halzen, Madsen and Cowen, that small, faint flash could bring big discoveries about the farthest reaches of outer space.
“It’s almost a certainty that we will see things no one has expected before,” Cowen says. “We are more or less opening up this window on the universe and seeing what flies in.”
Going Deeper: