Are you one of the authors of this paper? Email us from your institutional or work email address mentioning this article's arXiv ID and we'll verify you and give you edit access to this page.
For the first time, Earth’s layered density is reconstructed from neutrino attenuation: IceCube unveils neutrino tomography of planets.
Links in the knowledge graph 1
Do you see through the Earth? To neutrinos, it’s braille. Every kilometer deeper—and the flux fades, like a note in cotton wool. Over ten years, IceCube listened to 368,071 stories and deciphered the interior. Mass and rotation were derived from weak interaction. Next—3D tomography of other worlds. Ghosts become our eyes.
🎯 Antarctic ice is the most transparent solid on Earth. If you stood at the depth of IceCube, you would see a ghostly flash from a neutrino that pierced the whole planet and your body along with it. But your eyes are not adapted to Cherenkov light—it is born only in the slowed-down light universe of an ultracold crystal.
🎬 In science fiction, neutrinos are the ideal postmen: they pierce stars and planets, carrying interstellar letters. Here, they become not senders, but the whisper of the Earth itself: we are not transmitting information through the planet, but reading its deep confession.
The neutrino beam weakens exponentially with traversed mass. X is the column density, the sum of all mass along the beam’s path. The more massive the planet in transparency, the fewer neutrinos will make it through.
I = \frac{8\pi}{3} \int_0^R \rho(r) r^4 dr
The polar moment of inertia is a measure of how mass is distributed radially. This formula turns the obtained density profile ρ(r) into a number that can be compared with gravitational measurements. The agreement confirms the entire neutrino chain.
