He turned a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into a telescope — and just won the Nobel Prize in Physics

When Belgian-American physicist Francis Halzen first pitched his wild idea in 1988, even he doubted it would work. His plan: bury a giant grid of light sensors in the crystal-clear ice at the South Pole and use a whole cubic kilometer of it as a telescope — one that catches ghostly particles called neutrinos streaming in from the far edges of the universe. Neutrinos are nearly impossible to spot: they slip through stars, planets, and people without leaving a trace. But when one smacks into an ice molecule, it throws off a tiny flash of light — and Halzen's IceCube observatory catches it. On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Halzen the 12-million-kronor (about $1.2 million) physics prize for discovering high-energy neutrinos from deep space and for the tenacity that built the instrument that made it possible — opening an entirely new kind of astronomy.