If you want to look into the face of God, or perhaps just win a Nobel Prize, there may be no better place than one of the blue metal buildings here, where hardy researchers and staff members will spend the winter months surrounded by dark, paralyzing cold.
About 50 people bunk down here every year for the Antarctic winter, when the sun never rises, and temperatures regularly hit 80 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and no flights can get through. Anyone who stays is here for the long haul.
But the payoffs could be significant: For the past 20 years, scientists stationed here at the South Pole have been pointing special telescopes up at the sky, hoping to decipher clues to the nature of the universe from the barely perceptible hiss of radiation coating the universe’s outer edges.
That hiss dates almost all the way back to the Big Bang. And now the researchers’ main instrument, the South Pole Telescope, is being joined by a series of smaller devices that may break open the long-running hunt to identify exactly what materials fill most of the interior of the universe.
All of the instruments detect microwave radiation—a type of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that can be 5,000 times as big as what our eyes see as light. The five-year-old South Pole Telescope has a 33-foot primary reflector, allowing detailed studies of the radiation in tightly focused sections of the sky, says John M. Kovac, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard University, one of a dozen participating institutions. The newer telescopes, he says, are designed for broader sweeps of the heavens. “We are trying to detect patterns in this microwave sky that are quite big, several times the size of the full moon,” Mr. Kovac says.
The new telescopes are called SPUD and Bicep2—the names are acronyms referring to polarization—and they are intended to help with two main research goals. One is the search to identify the nature of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which are believed to exist because calculations of gravitational effects across the universe indicate that there is far more stuff out there among the stars than can be seen visually. Cosmic background radiation helps in that search by providing a nearly uniform hum of emissions against which hidden objects—a distant cluster of galaxies, for example—create tiny distortions in the telescope’s images.
The second research goal is to test the most widely accepted theory about the Big Bang. That theory holds that the universe went through a super-fast expansion in a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, then settled into its current pattern of steady growth.
Studying the cosmic background radiation will help scientists see the polarization, or alignment, of the radiation. The nature of that alignment will give clues about whether the farthest reaches of the universe contain the gravitational waves that would have been created by the split second of rapid expansion that the theory envisions.
Much of the South Pole research is basic science aimed at answering such cutting-edge questions, with potentially major payoffs. George F. Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and John C. Mather, now a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing—with help from a satellite—that the cosmic background radiation is highly uniform, supporting the basic outline of the Big Bang theory. Mr. Smoot said it was like “seeing the face of God.” What South Pole researchers are trying to find are more like God’s fingerprints—wrinkles in the highly uniform structure of the outer universe.
Looking Up, Looking Down
Antarctica’s cold and extremely dry climate is a big advantage to researchers working on such problems. “You definitely need an exotic site” for such precise work, says Craig J. Hogan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. “We are watching the sky from underneath an atmosphere that both radiates and distorts light, and you need the driest and thinnest air you can find.”
Not every researcher here is focused first on the sky, however. Sven O. Lidstrom and Carlos Pobes, assistant researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, are planning to spend the next few months peering into the Antarctic ice.
Mr. Lidstrom and Mr. Pobes help run the $271-million IceCube particle detector, the single largest science project in the U.S. Antarctic Program. IceCube is a 250-acre array of 86 cables buried as deep as a mile and a half beneath the surface of the ice near the South Pole station.
IceCube is used to detect neutrinos, though its real quarry is also dark matter. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that shoot out of the nuclear combustion inside a star and can pass untouched through solid matter. But neutrinos can give off a spark of blue light when they hit an atom of ice. The ice covering Antarctica is exceedingly pure, and the thousands of detectors on IceCube’s 86 cables can pick up those sparks and show which direction the neutrinos came from.
The detector has been fully operational for only a year, and so far it’s detected neutrinos from only the sun and a supernova. If it functions as planned, it will give scientists a completely new tool for reconstructing the early universe, helping them find neutrinos that date from the earliest moments after the Big Bang. “We are the beginning of this new era,” Mr. Pobes says. “We have never observed the universe with neutrinos.”
Other astrophysics research at the Pole has more-immediate applications. Cosmic-ray detectors incorporated into the IceCube array play an important role in monitoring solar flares and storms by spotting subatomic particles from the sun and elsewhere in outer space, Just last month, a solar flare prompted commercial airlines to reroute some flights and raised warnings of possible malfunctions with mobile phones and GPS systems.
Another experiment with current-day applications, led by Utah State University, consists of infrared cameras at both the South Pole and McMurdo Station, on the Antarctic coast, that can see weather patterns about 50 miles in the sky. The project leader, Michael J. Taylor, a professor of physics at Utah State, says that range is too high for weather balloons and too low for satellites.
“It was a totally unknown region for a long time,” Mr. Taylor says. Improved studies of weather at that level could help meteorologists draw better connections among weather patterns nearer the ground, he says, and could also provide crucial mission forecasts for a new generation of commercial spacecraft being designed for the upper atmosphere.
