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Time of India
16 hours ago
- Science
- Time of India
Mysterious pulses buzzing beneath Antarctica? What is happening inside the Earth?
One of the most remote and least understood regions on Earth is Antarctica, which remains under the thick cover of the snow all year round. And this time, scientists have come across a cosmic mystery that challenges everything we thought we knew about particle physics. While the icy continent is known for its extreme conditions, it's now the center of an anomaly that could open a new chapter in astrophysics. High above the frozen region, a mission is stationed that is designed to listen for radio signals generated by high-energy neutrinos hitting the Antarctic ice. These neutrinos are some of the most elusive particles in the universe, often passing through matter without leaving a trace. But during this mission, which is known as ANITA, it detected something entirely unexpected, which were some different radio signals that appeared to be coming from deep within the Earth itself. Unlike expected signals from space-borne neutrinos, these mysterious pulses appear to be rising from below the horizon, completely going against the known models of how particles move through the Earth. What is ANITA? ANITA, a high-altitude balloon experiment flown over Antarctica, was originally designed to detect radio waves produced when cosmic neutrinos collide with the Antarctic ice. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like CVS Wants to Hide 87¢ Generic Viagra – Truth Inside Health Alliance by Friday Plans Learn More Undo These ultra-high-energy neutrinos are expected to come from above, not below. So when the team noticed signals arriving at steep angles, up to 30 degrees below the surface, it didn't make to physicist Stephanie Wissel, who is one of the authors of the paper Search for the Anomalous Events Detected by ANITA Using the Pierre Auger Observatory, 'The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice. ' She added, '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,' as quoted by the Newsweek. To reach ANITA from below, any particle would have to travel through thousands of miles of solid Earth. That kind of journey would usually weaken or completely stop any known particles like neutrinos or cosmic rays. Yet the signals were still strong, which added to the clues that something unusual was happening. Wissel suggested that one possibility could involve some unknown radio signal behaviour in icy or near-horizon conditions. 'My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand,' she said. 'But we certainly explored several of those—and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either. So, right now it's one of those long-standing mysteries. ' To get more answers, Wissel and her team are developing a new detector called the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations, or PUEO. The next-generation system will be even more sensitive to these strange radio bursts. Neutrinos themselves are notoriously difficult to detect. 'You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don't really interact,' she explained to Newsweek. So, capturing even one event could offer valuable insights into the universe's most distant and energetic processes. For now, the origin of the mysterious signals remains unknown, but the scientific world is watching closely.
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Science
- Hindustan Times
Strange, unexplained signals detected from Antarctic ice: Here's what scientists say
A team of researchers trying to locate neutrinos in the Antarctic stumbled upon unusual radio signals coming from below the Earth's surface rather than space. The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a range of equipment flown up on a balloon to capture waves from cosmic rays before they strike the Earth's surface, picked up the signals. This occurrence is contrary to the current commonly accepted norms of particle physics. The transmissions were caught from 30 degrees below the ice surface- a phenomenon quite uncommon for neutrinos. Stephanie Wissel, an astrophysicist at Penn State University and part of the team, said in her results journal, '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.' According to the team's calculations, neutrino signals are highly unlikely to be detected despite their widespread availability. The signals would have had to pass through thousands of kilometers of rock before being recorded, which makes the possibility incredibly low. 'You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don't really interact. So, this is the double-edged sword problem. If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable universe,' Wissel added. Given its secluded location and minimal interference from other signals, the Antarctic was picked as the backdrop of this study. Speaking about how the ANITA works, Wissel said, 'We have these radio antennas on a balloon that flies 40 kilometers above the ice in Antarctica. We point our antennas down at the ice and look for neutrinos that interact in the ice, producing radio emissions that we can then sense on our detectors.' After cross-referencing the data picked up by ANITA with two other independent detectors namely the IceCube Experiment and the Pierre Auger Observatory, the team found that the results didn't match. The signal has now been described as 'anomalous' and confirmed not to be a result of neutrino activity. 'My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,' Wissel noted. 'So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries, and I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting.' Several plausible theories to explain the incident have been provided with some suggesting the existence of dark matter and unknown radio wave behavior due to the ice and proximity to the horizon. However, no concrete answer has been reached.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Strange Radio Signals Detected Emanating From Deep Under Antarctic Ice
Nearly two decades ago, an experiment floating high above Antarctica caught a weird signal. Designed to capture the radio spurts of cosmic rays falling from above, in 2006 the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) recorded a short pulse of radio waves from below – an event that looked like an upside-down shower of cosmic rays, not bouncing off the surface, but emanating from under the ice sheet. The balloon-borne suite of instruments recorded a similar event in 2014, and scientists have been scratching their heads ever since. No explanation quite fits, suggesting that the culprit could be a particle unknown to science. "The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice," explains astrophysicist Stephanie Wissel of Pennsylvania State University. "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." The signal itself, a very brief pulse of radio waves, is very similar to what we might see from an elusive tau neutrino, but there are several reasons neutrino interpretation of the signal is difficult to resolve. Scientists thought that such a neutrino may come from a supernova that then tunnels its way right through Earth and comes out the other side. However, only the 2014 detection coincided with a supernova that could be responsible – no such event was found for the 2006 detection. In addition, the steep angle of the detection means that the neutrino would have had to tunnel through rock before emerging from the ice. Neutrinos stream through matter all the time; it's what they do, and why we call them 'ghost particles'. That's not the problem. "You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don't really interact," Wissel says. "So, this is the double-edged sword problem. If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable Universe." To help solve the mystery of the upward-propagating radio pulses, a large international team of researchers made a careful study of data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, designed to study high-energy cosmic rays. They conducted simulations to determine how the ANITA events might appear in the Pierre Auger Observatory data, and combed through the observations from 2004 to 2018, looking for similar signals. They found nothing that explains the ANITA detections. However, in science, finding nothing often means finding something – even if that something is a narrower set of options. In this case, it means that the scientists could confidently rule out neutrinos as an explanation for the signals. However, that doesn't automatically mean we're looking at a new particle, either. We're going to need further observations, and hopefully new detections, to determine what it is that ANITA saw coming from the Antarctic ice. ANITA is retired; its last flight took place in 2016. A new Antarctic balloon experiment called the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO), the successor to ANITA, is due to commence operations soon. "My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either," Wissel says. "So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries, and I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting." The latest results were published in Physical Review Letters. Light Squeezed Out of Darkness in Surprising Quantum Simulation Physicists Actually Made The 'World's Smallest Violin' For a Serious Reason Spiral Magnetism Seen in Synthetic Crystal For The First Time
