How a Soviet physicist’s 1960 idea led to the birth of neutrino astronomy and this year’s Nobel Prize in physics

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Belgian physicist Francis Halzen for his “decisive contribution to the IceCube neutrino observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Neutrinos were long considered almost impossible to detect, especially those arriving from deep space. Tracing them to their cosmic sources is even harder here on Earth because the vast majority come from the Sun or are produced in the planet’s magnetic field. Yet scientists managed to detect them with a project of astonishing scale, first proposed by Soviet physicist Moisey Markov