IceCube Reveals Cosmic Neutrino Sources and the Origins of Cosmic Rays

Discovering Astrophysical Neutrinos Beyond the Solar System

IceCube’s first major discovery was the detection of neutrinos from astrophysical sources beyond our solar system. One of the most notable sources was TXS 0506+056, identified through collaboration with observatories detecting gamma-ray, optical and radio signals.

TXS 0506+056 is a high-energy blazar—a galaxy that appears extremely bright and is associated with a supermassive black hole. Researchers searched for other objects with similar properties and confirmed that this class of sources can produce high-energy neutrinos. More recently, IceCube has made it possible to observe the Milky Way as a source of neutrino emission.

Measuring How Neutrinos Change

Beyond astronomy, IceCube has contributed significantly to scientists’ understanding of neutrino properties and behavior. There are three known types of neutrinos, and last year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics discovered that neutrinos can change from one type to another as they travel. IceCube has enabled researchers to measure this phenomenon with increasing precision.

What Cosmic Rays Reveal About the Galaxy

“Another area of research is cosmic rays, and that’s what I focus on,” says Díaz Vélez. “We found that they do not arrive uniformly from all directions, but instead come from preferred directions. This tells us about the distribution of their sources in the galaxy.”

Cosmic rays consist of protons and the nuclei of heavier atoms, and they make up most of IceCube’s data. “Detecting neutrinos is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” the researchers say. “For every neutrino that IceCube detects, it detects more than a million muons produced by cosmic rays.”

Processing IceCube’s High-Volume Data

Díaz Vélez serves as product coordinator for the IceCube collaboration, overseeing experimental data processing and the creation of simulations. “This involves calculating the direction of arrival, energy and type of particles detected every 2 milliseconds,” he says.

“We also need to simulate cosmic rays and neutrinos at comparable speeds. Both tasks require a high-performance computing network distributed around the world, totaling about 10,000 CPU cores and 1,000 GPUs.”