Science

Bert and Ernie

detected 2011 and 2012, published 2013
The first two high-energy neutrinos ever caught from outside the solar system were nicknamed after Sesame Street puppets, and the pair cracked a sixty-year chase.
Documented

Two events, then twenty-seven

Bert and Ernie alone reached only 2.8 sigma, not enough to claim discovery. The follow-up search of May 2010 to April 2012 data found 25 more starting events above 30 TeV; the combined 27 excluded a purely atmospheric origin at 4.1 sigma, and with more data the excess passed 7 sigma. Published in Physical Review Letters in 2013, it was the first observation of PeV-energy cosmic neutrinos.

Assessment: Documented: the energies, the significance climb, and the PRL papers. The ghosts were real and they were cosmic.
Stories

The diffuse-flux prophecy

Theory had predicted the first sign would be a diffuse glow of many neutrinos, not a single dramatic source, and that is exactly what arrived. For once the textbooks called the order of discovery. The 2012 Chiba analysts who flagged the two big events were checking whether the instrument worked; it worked so well it found a new sky.

Assessment: Stories: the discovery of a new astronomy appeared as two anomalies in a calibration check.
Interesting claims

A century of DUMANDs

The road to Bert and Ernie ran through DUMAND off Hawaii, terminated 1995, Baikal's NT-200, AMANDA's prototype strings, and ANTARES in the Mediterranean, fifty-plus years of failed or underpowered attempts at a natural Cherenkov detector. The puppets were standing on five decades of sunken hardware.

Assessment: Interesting: the discovery took one year of the right detector and fifty years of wrong ones.
Sources and further reading
  1. IceCube Collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111 (2013): the two PeV events and the 2.8 sigma caveat
  2. IceCube timeline: Bert (Aug 2011) and Ernie (Jan 2012) found by the Chiba group, published July 8 2013
  3. arXiv:1903.11481, History of high-energy neutrino astronomy: the 27-event HESE analysis at 4.1 sigma, later past 7 sigma; the DUMAND termination in 1995
Worth asking

When the two most important particles of the decade are named for children's television, who is the naming convention for?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+