Science
Scientists In Antarctica Baffled By Discovery Of Mysterious Radio Signals Beneath The Ice
Scientists have discovered ‘bizarre’ radio waves beneath Antarctic ice that ‘defy the present knowledge of particle physics’.
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a suite of devices designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays striking the atmosphere and carried on balloons high above Antarctica’s surface, made the discovery of the enigmatic waves.
To learn more about the cosmic events that occur throughout the universe, researchers flown a balloon 40 kilometres (29 miles) into the atmosphere and used several devices to study signals travelling to Earth.
However, when radio waves were discovered to be emanating from the ice, the crew discovered something surprising.
The selection of Antarctica was based on the fact that there was less interference from other radio waves there.
Stephanie Wissel, one of the researchers, stated that they were looking for a particle called neutrinos when they came upon the radio waves.
“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.
Although they are typically difficult to detect, neutrinos are crucial to our comprehension of the cosmos. Since the radio waves would have had to travel through thousands of kilometres of rock before being absorbed by it, they should have been invisible.
According to Wissel, a billion neutrinos could be moving through you at any given time, yet they don’t communicate 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.”
But when the balloon was sent far above the ice, the researchers compared their data with two valuable tests and discovered that they did not agree.
This implies that they discovered something other than neutrinos.
It is still unknown and cannot be verified, despite some claims that what they discovered was dark matter.
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 researchers’ findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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