The 2026 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Francis Halzen, a pioneering Belgian astrophysicist whose work developing a massive observatory in Antarctica to detect “ghostly” cosmic particles laid the foundations for an “entirely new type of astronomy.”

Axar.az reports, citing CNN, that the physics prize was announced on Tuesday at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. “Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument,” said Nobel committee chair Mark Pearce in a statement. “His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy.”

Halzen first presented plans for this observatory – now called the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – in 1988, envisioning a vast apparatus in the Antarctic ice that could capture particles known as neutrinos.

The observatory harnesses a key property of neutrinos; namely that they produce a flash of light when colliding with an atomic nucleus which could be tracked by sensors embedded in clear, glacial ice.

Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called “ghostly” because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. They have almost no mass. They can travel through the most extreme environments, like stars, planets and entire galaxies, and remain the same.

It should be noted that Nobel Week will run from October 5 to 12. The laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine were announced on October 5, while the Physics laureates were announced today. The Chemistry laureate will be announced on October 7, followed by the Literature laureate on October 8 and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate on October 9. The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences laureate will be announced on October 12.