Apparently, a telescope can be made of Antarctic ice.

Francis Halzen stuck with a big idea: use South Pole ice to detect tiny particles from space. A team from around the world made it work. This week, his part in that work earned the Nobel Prize in Physics.

A life in picturesArchive photographs · Tap to enlarge

The physicist↗The observatory above the ice↗Building the unlikely↗One of the eyes in the ice↗

←1 / 4→Swipe to explore

Archive · 1 / 4Close ×

The physicist

Francis Halzen at the XXI Workshop on Neutrino Telescopes in 2025.

Photo: INFN / infn.it · Source · CC0 1.0
We resize some photos and crop the small previews to fit. Each version keeps the license shown here.

← PreviousNext →

Francis Halzen’s idea needed an unusual place to study space: deep inside Antarctic ice. The Belgian-born physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison helped turn it into IceCube. This observatory—a place for studying space—detects neutrinos, tiny particles that are very hard to detect. Apparently, the universe was not going to make this convenient.

In the late 1980s, Halzen saw what might be possible with polar ice. Getting there took early experiments, engineering, money and years of building. APS reports that people doubted whether the project would succeed. Halzen admitted he had doubts, too.

IceCube has sensors buried deep beneath the South Pole. They record light made when a neutrino reacts with matter, such as ice. The detector covers roughly a cubic kilometer of ice. That is about the volume of a cube one kilometer long, wide and high. There is no eyepiece to look through. Scientists study tiny signals with great care.

In 2013, the team reported evidence of high-energy neutrinos from space. Later observations made that evidence stronger. The National Science Foundation also lists other results: finding a source of these particles in space in 2018, and making a neutrino view of the Milky Way in 2023. IceCube opened a new way to study powerful events beyond Earth.

On October 6, 2026, Halzen won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in this work. His story includes a long list of people: researchers, engineers, technicians and everyone who made years of work at the South Pole possible. One person kept going and helped a team from around the world build something none could have built alone.

Our take: courage can mean giving an uncertain idea years of careful work while staying willing to learn from the evidence. Here, the result is a working observatory and discoveries shared through research papers. Apparently, “unlikely” was where they started, not where they finished.

Added October 11, 2026. The date above is the day the Nobel Prize was announced. APS published a fuller account on October 8. IceCube’s discoveries and the gallery photos came before the award.