Particle Hunters Can Spend a Lifetime Searching for Answers

Nathan Whitehorn was not in a good place. As his computer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison started churning through a couple of years of IceCube data—using a new way of hunting high-energy neutrinos Whitehorn and his colleague Claudio Kopper had cooked up—alerts signaling a potential detection started pinging up onscreen. “By the time we finished looking at one event, another would pop up,” says Whitehorn. They had confirmed the detection of the first two high-energy neutrinos known to come from outside our galaxy, and spotted 26 more for good measure. Without wanting to blurt out the results before they were sure, the team went through roughly a year of cloak-and-dagger confirmation before finally, in late November 2013, letting the whole world know.