Neutrinos

Neutrinos on TerraPulse are organized into the neutrino Eventdex — one slot per alert. Neutrinos pass through planets almost unimpeded; catching one takes a cubic kilometer of instrumented Antarctic ice. Each slot is a single high-energy particle that was actually detected and flagged for the world to follow up. No estimates, no forecasts.

The dexes

Provenance

Every alert traces to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a detector built into a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. When IceCube records a neutrino energetic enough to likely come from an astrophysical source, it issues a real-time public alert so telescopes elsewhere can look at the same patch of sky. Those alerts are the slots in this dex.

What’s in a record

Each alert slot carries:

• Time — detection time, UTC
• Direction — right ascension and declination on the sky
• Positional uncertainty — the error region telescopes should search
• Estimated energy — the reconstructed particle energy
• Signalness — the estimated probability the event is astrophysical rather than atmospheric