Mysterious radio signals coming from “impossible angles” deep within Antarctica are leaving even scientists completely baffled.
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The radio waves were detected by a NASA project called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), which uses a set of instruments designed to detect particles known as neutrinos.
It appears the radio signals picked up by ANITA cannot be explained by current understanding of particle physics, leading scientists to believe there may be other types of particles or interactions behind the pulses.
“The radio waves we detected were coming at very steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Dr. Stephanie Wissel, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University, in an interview with the Daily Mail.
“It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t have an explanation for what these anomalies are,” said the expert, who is part of the ANITA project.
As mentioned, ANITA’s main goal is to detect radio waves created by neutrinos. They use balloons floating 30 to 39 km above Antarctica—where other signals are rare—to specifically search for radio waves caused by neutrinos hitting the ice.
Neutrinos are very common, but because they are the smallest subatomic particles, their size makes them extremely difficult to detect. Moreover, they have no charge and typically do not affect the objects they pass through.
“You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any given moment, but neutrinos don’t interact. If we detect them, it means they traveled all that way without interacting with anything else,” explained Dr. Wissel.
“We point our antennas at the ice and look for neutrinos interacting in the ice, producing radio emissions that we can then detect. We may be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the universe.”
However, the radio waves found challenge this logic because they don’t appear to be reflecting off the ice; instead, they seem to be coming from the horizon. For this reason, researchers speculate they may have encountered a completely new type of particle.
“My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect is occurring near the ice and also near the horizon—something I don’t fully understand. But we’ve explored several of them, and we still haven’t been able to find anything,” Dr. Wissel explained.
After this exciting discovery, researchers from the ANITA project began working on a larger detector called PUEO, which will be better at detecting hidden particles and may help understand where these signals come from.
“I’m excited because when we fly PUEO, we’ll have greater sensitivity. In principle, we should detect more anomalies and maybe we can finally understand what they are.”
Photo and video: Unsplash. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
