Just back from a fantastic week in Alexandria, Virginia, celebrating the announcement of their huge new discovery with my IceCube friends. They’ve found the first “neutrino star” — although it isn’t a star exactly; it’s a galaxy (a blazar to be precise) about half-way between here and the edge of the visible universe.

Amazingly, although I finished my book just before this drama began to unfold, Francis Halzen, who’s been the guiding spirit of this project for almost thirty years, actually predicts just such a discovery in the very last paragraph of the book. His “criminal optimism” can make him creepily clairvoyant sometimes.

Here’s my article in Scientific American.
(The three papers mentioned in the article are here, here, and here.)

It was quite a week. We’ve all got to get some rest …