Designed to observe neutrinos, which are emitted by exploding stars and move close to the speed of light, the telescope is attracting new attention in the wake of last week's discovery of a particle that appears to be the Higgs boson - a basic building block of the universe.

IceCube is essentially a string of light detectors buried in the ice through hot water drilling. When neutrinos, which are everywhere, interact in the ice, they produce charged particles that then create light, which can be detected. The ice acts as a net that isolates the neutrinos, making them easier to observe. It also protects the telescope from potentially damaging radiation.

Scientists are attempting to track the particles to discover their points of origin, in the hope that will give clues on what happens in space, particularly in unseen parts of the universe known as dark matter. Before IceCube was completed in 2010, scientists had observed just 14 neutrinos. With the huge new instrument, paired with another telescope in the Mediterranean, hundreds of neutrinos have been detected. So far, all of those have been created in the earth's atmosphere, but scientists hope to eventually detect those from space.