Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for IceCube. It is a giant observatory buried in Antarctic ice.

IceCube hunts neutrinos. These are tiny particles that stream through everything, including you, right now.

Most neutrinos pass through Earth unnoticed. But a few crash into ice atoms and make tiny flashes of light.

IceCube’s sensors catch these flashes. That lets scientists trace neutrinos back to violent cosmic events.

Halzen pushed the project for decades. His vision turned a bold idea into a working telescope for the invisible universe.

Neutrinos are sometimes called ghost particles. Trillions pass through your body every second. They come from the sun, supernovas and distant galaxies. IceCube uses a cubic kilometre of ice as its detector. The project took years to build in harsh conditions. Halzen first proposed it in the 1990s. The IceCube lab cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Thousands of sensors dot the ice. It keeps running through the polar night.