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what do you think of when you think of
Antarctica ice penguins David
Attenborough talking about ice and
penguins but Antarctica isn't just a
penguin paradise it's also a haven for
astronomy and for weirdly some of the
same reasons the cold keeps the air
crystal clear a lot of the time and
reduces thermal interference which is
exactly what many telescopes need and
dark toukas isolation also means the
skies are some of the darkest on earth
and its position at the South Pole means
that there can be months of continuous
darkness exactly what astronomers want
if they're looking at something faint
astronomers and physicists have even
figured out a way of using the ice
itself as a giant observatory and as a
window into the solar system's ancient
history the only downside of astronomy
in Antarctica is that like it's
Antarctica but Hardy scientists and
hearty instruments mean that that's not
as much of a barrier as you might think
and to prove it here are five reasons
why Antarctica is the place to be when
you want to study space if you've ever
thought that astronomers spend too much
time looking up well the IceCube
neutrino Observatory is for you they do
astronomy and physics by staring down
into ice near the South Pole is pretty
much the only place on earth where you
will find huge slow-moving expanses of
ice that don't melt not completely that
is Ice Cube stares into a cubic
kilometer of ice near the South Pole in
order to studied neutrinos which are
fast-moving elusive incredibly tiny
subatomic particles that we mostly
understand except for a bunch of stuff
that we're still trying to learn about
them and neutrinos will pass through
just about anything without bumping into
them like a trillion go through your
nose every second which makes them
incredibly difficult to study in a
laboratory seeing the unlucky few that
happened to bump into something
generally requires building giant
detectors but in 1999 a team of
scientists pointed out that they could
just use the Antarctic Ice Sheet
as one giant neutrino target which led
to the development of the IceCube
project si neutrino detectors don't need
to be made of anything special but they
do need to be pretty big and pretty
see-through like a giant ice sheets most
neutrinos will actually pass right
through the ice but every once in a
while one crashes into a water molecule
and that collision sets off a chain
reaction that eventually releases light
that ice cubes detectors can see but the
light doesn't just tell ice cube
scientists that there was a neutrino
there it's Direction intensity and other
properties can show scientists a lot
about the neutrino that caused it and
where that neutrino came from lots of
things in the universe make neutrinos
but far fewer make neutrinos with as
much energy as ice cubes detectors are
tuned to notice and those detectors see
a couple hundred neutrinos a day and
scientists have used data about those
neutrinos to study some pretty extreme
environments outside of our planet like
spinning neutron stars and the violent
centers of galaxies but that's not all
many scientists think dark matter which
has mass but doesn't give off light
might be made of tiny particles that act
somewhat like neutrinos ice cube is an
ideal observatory to search for evidence
of those hypothesized particles so far
though they haven't seen anything but
they're still looking after all they've
got the ice for it there are of course
also more traditional telescopes in
Antarctica including a few that study
microwaves the type of thing that you
might use in your kitchen to heat up a
burrito microwaves have longer
wavelengths than a visible light and
they're used for heating up food because
water absorbs microwaves really well
turning them into heat in fact water is
so good at absorbing microwaves that
most of the microwave radiation earth
receives from space never gets to the
ground it's absorbed by water in the
atmosphere but that's why scientists
looked at Antarctica when they were
planning out the background imaging of
cosmic extragalactic polarization
experiment or by SAP for short
Antarctica is the largest desert on
earth the air there is too
too cold to hold much water so
microwaves pass right through it but
bicep doesn't just study any microwaves
along with the nearby Keck array it
studies the cosmic microwave background
or CMB the oldest light in the universe
the CMB is a sort of fingerprint of the
Big Bang that lets scientists examine
the universe when it was only a couple
hundred thousand years old by revealing
how matter was distributed all the way
back then astronomers can test the Big
Bang model by testing its predictions of
how the universe evolved and where
matter should be against the blobby
arrangements of matter that we see in
the CMB it's one of the best tools for
understanding the universe and
Antarctica is one of the few places on
earth with a clear view and biceps
already made some great contributions to
our understanding of the cosmos the CMB
shows us evidence of where matter was in
the early universe and those
measurements almost exactly match up
with what we would expect from our
models which helps us confirm that our
understanding of all of this is on the
right track best of all it also helped
astronomers shed light on some things
they don't really understand yet which
means more science to do the name of the
South Pole telescope is pretty spot-on
it's at the South Pole it's also a
telescope spt studies microwaves just
like bicep and while it's also been used
to study the CMB a lot of its time has
been spent looking at what happened to
the CMB z' light as those microwaves
move through space because antarctica
isn't just dry it's also high SP t has
less light distorting atmosphere above
it than many other places on earth
because it's sitting on top of almost
three kilometres of ice on top of that
Antarctica is also dark at least in the
winter the Sun doesn't rise for months
so the sky stays dark and instruments
stay at a pretty constant temperature so
SPT and other telescopes can just keep
looking out into the universe all winter
with almost no interruption recently
it's been used to study galaxy clusters
some of the biggest structures in the
universe gas and dust around these
stirs distort the light of the Cosmic
Microwave Background
so SPT can understand the amount of mass
in the clusters by looking at how much
the light is distorted and by
understanding clusters astronomers can
understand the kinds of influences that
formed them and that includes stuff that
we don't fully understand like dark
matter and dark energy dark matter pulls
things in the universe together without
emitting its own light and dark energy
pushes things apart these competing
forces both influence the formation of
galaxy clusters so SP T's measurements
can help astronomers inch their way
toward understanding the behavior of the
universe's most mysterious features and
speaking of mysterious pieces of the
universe SP T also participated in a
global network known as the event
horizon telescope this project famously
combined images from lots of telescopes
around the world to take the first
picture ever of the hot gas surrounding
a supermassive black hole the bigger the
distance between the telescopes the
better the event horizon picture would
be and it's harder to get farther from
most places on earth than the South Pole
meaning Antarctica's remoteness was
actually an advantage and dark teeka is
constantly surrounded by some of the
strongest circular ocean currents and
winds on earth they make it hard to get
to Antarctica in the first place and
they make it hard to leave whether by
ship or by plane and that might sound
like a bad thing but nASA has found a
way to use Antarctica's powers for good
they've launched a series of
football-field-sized balloons that get
carried around the continent by those
strong predictable winds giving us
observatories that just float around
kilometers off the ground with so much
less air between them and outer space
these flying instruments can see things
that are much harder to find from the
ground things like cosmic rays charged
particles like protons that fly through
space at nearly the speed of light
cosmic rays come from all over the place
in the universe but different kinds of
objects make different kinds of rays so
by studying the Rays astronomers can
learn
about the objects themselves Sobotka's
mission was able to use cosmic rays to
study how abundant elements like boron
and carbon are throughout the universe
scream and Anita to other high-altitude
balloons have used cosmic rays from
dying stars to understand supernovas the
explosions made by dying stars other
Antarctic balloons have studied Earth's
magnetic field and still others have
studied the magnetic fields of stars all
these balloons don't just take advantage
of Antarctica's plentiful winds daytime
lasts for months during the summer so
you don't have to worry about
solar-powered instruments going dead at
night and you don't have to worry about
balloons cooling down as the temperature
drops at night because there is no night
all thanks to Antarctica's unbeatable
location as an island at the South Pole
now let's come full circle to another
group of Antarctic astronomers who look
down instead of up those working with
the Antarctic search for meteorites
which is about as well named as the
South Pole telescope in the 70s
scientists started realizing that
Antarctica is so completely covered in
ice that there are huge stretches where
there are hardly any natural rocks and
if you do find a rock there's a better
than usual chance that it is not from
Earth over the decades the Antarctic
search for meteorites or ann's met and
other teams have found about 50 thousand
meteorites down there and it's not just
stuff that fell recently the ice sheet
acts like a conveyor belt as it flows
carrying old meteorites along for the
ride until it crunches up against
something like a mountain range near the
mountain range the ice bunches up
squeezing trapped ancient rocks toward
the surface
most of the meteorite scientists find
there are from when the most common
types of asteroids crashed into other
asteroids with debris from the collision
eventually finding its way to earth
these ordinary chondrites as they're
known revealed the conditions of the
early solar system when the asteroids
first formed but not all meteorites are
ordinary chondrite sand some of the
others come with very specific stories
based on what it's made out of
scientists can tell which specific
object in the solar
system a meteorite came from lots of
meteorites come from Vesta one of the
solar system's largest asteroids but
lots come from other places like Mars
and in the 90s a team studying a Martian
meteorite known as alh84001 made an
announcement that is still controversial
more than twenty years later they
thought they saw signs of microscopic
fossils traces they claim could only
have been left behind by ancient Martian
bacteria most scientists don't agree
with those claims but everyone does
agree that without Antarctica's isolated
ice sheets this and thousands of other
meteorites would never have been found
and without them we would have a much
worse understanding of our place in our
solar system and in our universe so
Antarctica might be cold remote dry and
icy and dark for half the year but
that's not enough to stop our intrepid
astronomers and what are they're looking
up into space or down into the ice
they're teaching us more about our place
in the universe than they ever could if
we wrote off Antarctica as only being
good for penguins
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