Featured Image Credit: Stephanie Wissel/Penn State
Topics: Antarctica, Space, Science
Gregory Robinson
Topics: Antarctica, Space, Science
'Bizarre' radio waves have been detected underneath ice in Antarctica by scientists that 'defy the current understanding of particle physics'.
The mysterious waves were discovered by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a range of instruments flown on balloons high above the surface of Antarctica that were created to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.
Researchers analysed signals travelling to Earth using different instruments by flying them on a balloon that was sent 40km (29 miles) into the atmosphere to retrieve more information about the cosmic events that take place across the universe.
The team found something unexpected, however, when radio waves were found transmitting from the ice instead.
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Antarctica had been chosen because it was a place that had limited interference from other radio waves.
One of the researchers, Stephanie Wissel, said they discovered the radio waves while searching for a particle known as neutrinos.
“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” Wissel, an associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics from Penn State, said.
The neutrinos are important for our understanding of the universe and are usually hard to detect. The radio waves should have been undetectable and they would have had to have gone through thousands of kilometers of rock and ultimately been absorbed into them.
Wissel said there could be a billion neutrinos passing through you at any moment, however they don’t interact with us.
“So, this is the double-edged sword problem,” she said. “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.”
However, after sending the balloon high above the ice, the researchers cross-referenced their findings with two precious experiments and found that their results did not match up.
This suggests that what they found were not neutrinos, but something different.
Although there have been some theories that what they found was dark matter, it remains a mystery and cannot be confirmed.
In a press release about the findings, Wissel explained: “My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effects occur 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.”
The findings were published by the researchers in the journal Physical Review Letters.