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South Pole Telescope will study 'noise' from the early universe
Scientists just got a valuable tool in their quest to understand the cosmic microwave background radiation that persists from the earliest days of the universe. The South Pole Telescope recently received an ultra-sensitive camera that will study the cosmic microwave background at an extreme level of detail. Its 16,000 detectors (ten times more than a previous experiment) can spot minuscule changes in temperature when they receive light, helping them pick up the ancient microwave energy that's virtually omnipresent in the universe but difficult to detect with conventional methods.
Scientists may have found Earth's largest canyon
An international team of researchers led by Durham University believe they've discovered the largest canyon on Earth. Using satellite data and ground-penetrating radar, they estimate it to be more than 100 km long and as deep as 1 km in places. They'll need to make direct measurements to confirm these findings, though that will be difficult given that the canyon is buried under several kilometers of East Antarctic ice sheet. The team suspects that the canyon was either carved out of the bedrock by water flowing under the ice or is so absurdly old that it was around before Antarctica shifted to the South Pole via tectonic forces and frozen over.
What to pack for a long, lonely trek across the Antarctic
Captain Robert Falcon Scott's mission to become the first to reach the South Pole famously ended in tragedy. A double tragedy, in fact, because Scott and his crew perished after finding that a rival Norwegian team had already beaten them to the punch. They died in 1912, while attempting to walk back to the Antarctic coast, having discovered nothing but a red and blue flag marking their destination. Their only consolation was that, unlike the Norwegians, they had stopped to collect valuable geological samples and other scientific information along the way. If they'd had better technology, would they have survived? For the sake of polar explorer Ben Saunders, who's currently in Antarctica re-tracing Scott's steps, we certainly hope so. Saunders and his companion Tarka L'Herpiniere are in the middle of a four-month, 1,800-mile expedition, without support by air or land, to re-trace and complete Scott's final journey. It's the first such attempt to do so, but the journey isn't about exploration this time: It's more a test of human endurance. It's also about pushing technology to its limits. Armed with a pair of Ultrabooks supplied by Intel, one of the pair's main sponsors, and a carbon-fiber sled packed with other devices, they will attempt to survive and blog about their journey. We met up with the pair before their outbound flight from the UK to find out exactly what they were taking with them.
Visualized: world's largest neutrino observatory rivals Guatemala sinkhole
Without question, one of the images from 2010 will be the insane, almost incomprehensible sinkhole that emerged in Guatemala earlier this year, but this particular shot from the South Pole does an outstanding job of vying for equal attention. Coming directly from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this is a look into the planet's largest neutrino observatory, which was just completed after half a decade of work with $279 million. The goal? To detect "subatomic particles traveling near the speed of light," and when you have an ice-bound telescope that encompasses a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, well... you've high hopes for success. Will this pipe into the underworld finally lead us to understanding Dark Matter? Will century-old mysteries of the universe finally have answers? Even if not, we're envisioning a heck of an entry fee when it's converted into the world's longest firehouse pole and marketed to affluent tourists who make the trip down.
