It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anne Strange Champs.

Every scientist dreams dreams of having a breakthrough moment, making a major discovery.

But when it happens, it's not always obvious.

No, that's the interesting thing.

In this particular discovery, there was no moment.

This is Francis Haltsin, the lead scientist at one of the coldest observatories on the planet,

the ice-cube neutrino detector at the South Pole.

And his team has just cracked a gigantic mystery.

A mystery about one of the tiniest objects in the universe.

Cosmic neutrinos.

We actually have collected neutrinos for five years.

We couldn't figure out where they came from.

And so this was the moment when we figured out what their origin was.

We have been trying this since 2013 and have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Trying to correlate these neutrinos with maps of objects in the universe. we had no clue where they came from.

So this was like the ultimate cosmic needle in a haystack.

I mean, how do you search for something impossibly tiny and invisible

in a place as big as the entire universe.

Holson and his team decided to use the Ice Cube Observatory to catch an incoming high-energy neutrino

and then send out an emergency alert

asking astronomers all over the world to trace its path.

We would reconstruct the direction,

...