Credit: Christian R. RohlederScientists have detected mysterious radio signals coming from deep within the Antarctic ice, and they don’t know what’s causing them. Researchers at Penn State used a special cosmic particle detector—a device that picks up tiny particles from space—to find these unusual signals. According to a press release, these signals “defy the current understanding of particle physics,” meaning they don’t match what scientists currently know about how particles behave. The detector, which is part of a project called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), is an unusual setup—it’s actually hanging from a cluster of high-altitude balloons. Normally, ANITA detects particles that come from space and bounce off the Earth’s surface. But this time, the signals seemed to be coming from below the ice, which was unexpected and confusing. Stephanie Wissel, a physics and astronomy professor at Penn State who worked on the ANITA team, explained that they were originally searching for tiny, hard-to-detect particles called neutrinos when they found these strange radio waves instead. “The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles,” Wissel said in the press release, “like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice.” The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, but the researchers admitted they still don’t have a clear explanation. “We still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are,” Wissel said, “but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos.” Neutrinos are tiny particles that pass through almost everything without interacting—meaning they rarely bump into other particles. They come from powerful cosmic events like exploding stars (supernovae) or particle accelerators. Even though trillions of neutrinos pass through us every second, they’re extremely hard to detect because they barely leave a trace. “You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don’t really interact,” Wissel explained. “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.” After comparing ANITA’s readings with other neutrino detectors, the team concluded that the signals they found were something entirely different—something they still can’t explain. Wissel has a theory: “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. So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries.” Since ANITA is nearly 20 years old, NASA and other institutions are developing a more advanced balloon-based detector called the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO). This new detector will be bigger and better at finding tiny particles like neutrinos—and maybe even solve the mystery of these strange Antarctic signals. “I’m excited that when we fly PUEO, we’ll have better sensitivity,” Wissel said. “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 post Strange Radio Signals from Antarctic Ice Leave Scientists Baffled appeared first on Anomalien.com.