A telescope made of ice

This might be the strangest telescope ever built. It doesn't point at the sky: it's buried up to a mile and a half deep in the ice at the South Pole. This week, the man behind it, Francis Halzen, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics.

For decades he and an international team chased "ghost particles": neutrinos that fly straight through walls, people and the whole Earth. Christmas 1993 brought blurry signals. Deeper ice brought crystal-clear ones. Then came 5,160 sensors in a cubic kilometer of ice, two record-breaking flashes nicknamed Bert and Ernie, and the first evidence of ghost particles from deep space. When the Nobel committee called, he was writing a funding proposal.