NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for October 11, 2026 highlights the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which uses almost 100 holes melted near the South Pole as an astronomical observatory. Astronomers lowered a long string studded with basketball-sized light detectors into each vertical shaft; the water in each hole then refreezes around the instruments.

The detectors are sensitive to blue light emitted in the surrounding clear ice. That light comes from fast-moving secondary particles released when high-energy neutrinos from powerful cosmic processes collide with ice molecules. The image, taken in 2010, shows one of the last detector strings being lowered, according to the source, making IceCube the largest neutrino detector ever created.

The APOD entry states that IceCube has now detected many such neutrinos, and that a founding leader of the IceCube Collaboration was announced earlier that week as a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, in recognition of unprecedented discoveries.