9:16 a.m., Nov. 25, 2009----A University of Delaware research team is now at the South Pole helping to build IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice, and Delaware K-12 students can join them without even putting on a parka.

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Delaware classrooms are invited to join the UD team in a virtual way, from Dec. 1-18, through “Extreme 2009: An Antarctic Adventure,” a pilot Web-based program that will include daily blogs and photos from the research team, a full-color study guide, and participation in a “phone call to the deep freeze” for selected schools.

Teachers may register for the program online at the “Antarctic Adventure” Web site.

Funding for the online expedition is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the education and outreach component to research projects led by Prof. Thomas Gaisser, UD's Martin A. Pomerantz Chair of Physics and Astronomy.

“We look forward to sharing our experiences at the South Pole with Delaware students and the public,” Gaisser says. “We hope for many new discoveries about the universe, thanks to this novel telescope.”

The University of Wisconsin is coordinating construction of the telescope, which began in 2004 and involves more than 30 institutions including many international partners.

Gaisser and his team from the UD Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Bartol Research Institute are building the telescope's surface array of detectors called “IceTop.”

When completed in 2011, the telescope will consist of more than 80 cables, each containing 60 super-sensitive optical detectors, frozen over a mile-and-a-half-deep in the Antarctic ice. The detectors will look for evidence of neutrinos.

Often referred to as high-energy messengers from the universe, neutrinos are formed during such cataclysmic cosmic events as exploding stars and colliding galaxies. They easily pass right through planets and even our own bodies because they are full of energy, yet lack an electrical charge.

As a neutrino passes through the ice, it occasionally slams into a molecule of ice, which generates other particles that produce a flash of light as they pass through the ice.

IceCube's optical detectors are designed to capture the flash of light and stamp it with a precise time code. From this information, scientists can reconstruct the particle's path and trace its origins, perhaps to an exploding star or the matter falling into a black hole.

Coordinated by UD's Office of Communications and Marketing, “Extreme 2009: An Antarctic Adventure” is the seventh in UD's popular online expedition series, which has won state and national awards for excellence. Previous programs focused on another “extreme” environment: deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The Antarctic program may be expanded to a national audience next year based on the success of the pilot Delaware effort.

Article by Tracey Bryant