A breakdown of why the awarded work, Ice Cube, is significant:

  - A neutrino is an elementary subatomic particle. Neutrinos are produced by nuclear reactions inside stars, supernovae, radioactive decay. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe.
  - Neutrinos are known as "ghost particles". They have 0 charge and near-zero mass. They only react with the weak nuclear force and gravity. Incredibly hard to detect. Trillions can pass through a whole planet without hitting a single atom!
  - Neutrinos give us a pristine snapshot into the origin of the universe. They have travelled billions of years and trillions of miles without interacting with anything. Unless...we catch them!
  - Ice Cube does this. Located in Antarctica, the project turns a cubic kilometer of ice into a neutrino detector. How? Scientists drilled boreholes 2.5km deep into the ice and placed 5000 optical detectors to catch a neutrino interaction.
  - When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light. This produces something similar to a sonic boom. A faint, blue glow known as Cherenkov radiation (see it in action https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSuSG19Pcoc).
  - IceCube was first to detect neutrinos coming from outside the solar system, establishing the source of high energy cosmic radiation. It also opened a whole new chapter of neutrino astronomy.