Ask an astronomer to describe the perfect place to put a telescope, and here’s what she’ll tell you: Make it cold, make it dark, make it high-altitude, and make it remote. In short, make it Antarctica. {Read More »}

Jeff McMahon, Kathryn Schaffer, and Tom Crawford are all postdoctoral scientists at the University of Chicago and members of the South Pole Telescope Team. In the Antarctic summer season of 2006/7, the team raced to assemble a 30-foot (10-m) telescope at the South Pole, and in the 2007/8 season they upgraded and installed new equipment before running the telescope through its paces to collect more data about the mysterious cosmological force of dark energy. {Read More »}

The IceCube project is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos, particles created by the most violent events in the solar system: black holes, gamma ray bursts, and supernovas. When complete, the detector will serve as a deep-space telescope, allowing scientists to see impossibly distant cosmic events by detecting the neutrinos they generate. {Read More »}