At the bottom of the world, an observatory embedded in ice and designed to catch bountiful but elusive subatomic particles could give astronomers a brand-new look at the universe.

An international team of scientists reported on Thursday that over a two-year period they had detected 28 of these particles, known as neutrinos, that arrived from outside the solar system and possibly from across the universe.

“This gives us a new way to do astronomy,” said Francis Halzen, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin who is the principal investigator for the project, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The findings appear in the journal Science.

In 1987, detectors in the United States, Japan and Russia noted two dozen neutrinos that originated from a supernova explosion of a star about 165,000 light-years away. That was the first and last time distant neutrinos had been detected until the IceCube observatory, largely financed by the National Science Foundation, started its observations in 2010.