Science Mysterious Antarctic Signals Defy Physics — And Scientists Are Still Searching for Answers

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Mysterious Antarctic Signals Defy Physics — And Scientists Are Still Searching for Answers

 

For nearly a decade, scientists have been chasing a baffling mystery buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice: anomalous radio signals that appear to defy the known laws of physics. These strange signals, first detected during NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, were meant to be rare markers of ghostlike cosmic particles called neutrinos. Instead, they opened a new cosmic puzzle.

 

Neutrinos, often called "ghost particles," are known for their near-invisibility — they pass through stars, planets, even galaxies without interference. ANITA, which flew high-altitude balloons over Antarctica between 2006 and 2016, was designed to spot the fleeting radio bursts neutrinos emit when they collide with atoms in Antarctic ice. However, during its flights, ANITA detected unusual signals that didn’t seem to fit the behavior of any known neutrinos.

 

What made these detections strange was their origin: they appeared to be coming from well below the horizon. “The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Pennsylvania State University.

 

 

These signals would have had to pass through thousands of miles of solid Earth — something neutrinos should not be capable of according to current models. “They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,” added Justin Vandenbroucke, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.”

To investigate further, researchers turned to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, one of the world’s largest cosmic ray observatories.

 

 

This facility, which detects high-energy particles as they interact with the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, spent over a decade collecting data in the hope of finding similar signals. But in findings published in Physical Review Letters in March, the team concluded they had found nothing matching the ANITA anomalies. “Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,” said Wissel. “So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.”

 

Theories attempting to explain the signals have included exotic physics — among them, tau neutrinos, a rare type of neutrino that can decay into a heavy tau lepton and regenerate. Yet even this hypothesis falters. “You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,” Wissel said. “These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There’s just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.”

 

IceCube, another neutrino observatory buried deep within Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalies and found no evidence to support the neutrino theory. “Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,” said Vandenbroucke, who previously led IceCube’s neutrino sources group. Wissel echoed this: “It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos.”

 

Despite the lack of conclusive answers, the mystery has inspired new efforts. Wissel and her team are preparing for the launch of a new instrument, PUEO (Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations), set to fly over Antarctica in December. Larger and ten times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could be the key to solving the riddle. “Right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries,” Wissel said. “I’m excited that when we fly PUEO, we’ll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies.”

 

Peter Gorham, a physicist at the University of Hawaii and the designer of ANITA, remains intrigued. “Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,” Wissel added. “The most likely scenario is that it’s some mundane physics that can be explained, but we’re sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.” Until then, the strange Antarctic signals remain one of science’s most tantalizing cosmic puzzles.

 

  Adapted by ASEAN Now from CNN  2025-06-25

 

 

[boloaf]

It lost me after "For more then a decade".