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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.
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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.
