Hunting Cosmic Ghosts from the Edge of Space

After five years of development and a nail biting launch from Antarctica, the PUEO experiment has completed a 23 day balloon flight at the edge of space, hunting for some of the most energetic particles in the universe. The instrument flew at 120,000 feet above Antarctica, using the entire continent as a detector to search for ultra high energy neutrinos, elusive particles that could reveal secrets about the universe’s most violent events. Now safely back on the ice with 50-60 terabytes of data, scientists are preparing to search through the results to see if they’ve caught these messengers from distant galaxies.