Looking Down at the Sky with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, is the world's premier instrument for observations of TeV-PeV neutrinos, built to address a number of important questions including the behavior of neutrinos at these high energies and the origin of high-energy cosmic rays. Completed in 2010 with support from the United States, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Belgium, and others, the collaboration now spans 56 institutions in 14 countries. During its first ten years of observation, IceCube has provided the first detection of a nearly-isotropic astrophysical neutrino flux extending to well over a PeV, and the first detection of a TeV neutrino source beyond the Earth's atmosphere, the active galaxy TXS 0506+056, as well as a large number of other results on a wide variety of topics. Despite the detection of a single, distant source, the origin of the bulk of the cosmic neutrino flux seen by IceCube remains a mystery 8 years after its discovery. This talk will describe IceCube science and the next steps for the field to answer the deepening mystery of the astrophysical neutrino flux's origin, including next-generation international detector efforts.