MADISON, Wis., July 28 (UPI) -- A particle observatory at the South Pole has produced a scientific result about a phenomenon the telescope was not even designed to study, researchers say.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, designed to capture evidence of elusive but scientifically important subatomic particles called neutrinos, offered up some unexpected new science about cosmic rays, a University of Wisconsin-Madison release said Tuesday.
A "skymap" of cosmic rays falling on the Earth's Southern Hemisphere showed previously undiscovered patterns, with more detected in some parts of the sky than in others, the release said.
"IceCube was not built to look at cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are considered background," UWM researcher Rasha Abbasi said. "However, we have billions of events of background downward cosmic rays that ended up being very exciting".
A similar unevenness, called "anisotropy," has been detected in the Northern Hemisphere by previous experiments, Abbasi says, but its source is still a mystery.
UPI
