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posted by martyb on Sunday September 30 2018, @05:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the model-needed,-apply-within dept.

Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics

There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it. Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray—a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about—the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics—shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side.

And yet, since March 2016, researchers have been puzzling over two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays did burst out from the Earth, and were detected by NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)—a balloon-borne antenna drifting over the southern continent. ANITA is designed to hunt cosmic rays from outer space, so the high-energy neutrino community was buzzing with excitement when the instrument detected particles that seemed to be blasting up from Earth instead of zooming down from space. Because cosmic rays shouldn't do that, scientists began to wonder whether these mysterious beams are made of particles never seen before.

[...] [In a new paper,] a team of astrophysicists from Penn State University showed that there have been more upward-going high-energy particles than those detected during the two ANITA events. Three times, they wrote, IceCube (another, larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica) detected similar particles, though no one had yet connected those events to the mystery at ANITA. And, combining the IceCube and ANITA data sets, the Penn State researchers calculated that, whatever particle is bursting up from the Earth, it has much less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of being part of the Standard Model.


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  • (Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:08AM (5 children)

    by drussell (2678) on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:08AM (#742016) Journal

    I thought that according to Alex Jones it was Al Gore's cosmic death ray. ;)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:35AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @06:35AM (#742020)

    No it's the people inside the hollow earth that are communicating with someone.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Sunday September 30 2018, @07:40AM

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday September 30 2018, @07:40AM (#742025) Journal

      Well, given that we eat ourselves alive for oil and resources in five continents, while we keep the sixth one untouched because science or whatever, the "earth is hollow and something fishy going on in antarctica" theory is a viable contender against "the standard model is utterly wrong".

      --
      Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @08:03AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @08:03AM (#742027)

      People?, well, I suppose the Old Ones are/were people of sorts...though the nightmare scenario is that a shoggoth has accidentally activated one of their 'intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy.'

      HPL, what a knowing old card, eh?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:16AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:16AM (#742032)

        "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

        But then, you knew that, didn't you?

        Only other option is a pyramid left by the Predators to hunt Alien Zenomorphs who have acid for blood, like Republican members of the Senate Judicial Committee. Did you not ever think that Grassley, or Lyndsey Grahamcracker, could not just be a persona projected by a superior sport hunting extraterrestrial species? I did, and I am not all that crazy. Kavanaugh is from Planet Ten in the Eight Dimension! He will Serve Man! It is a cookbook! And all the Frat sex, same or otherwise.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:50AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:50AM (#742039)

          "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

          But then, you knew that, didn't you?

          Oh, aye...and I know he's keeping his head down in R'yleh...a wee bit further north than Antartica..

          Only other option is a pyramid left by the Predators to hunt Alien Zenomorphs who have acid for blood, like Republican members of the Senate Judicial Committee.

          I was going to say to this option 'too derivative' but you then followed it up with a strangely compelling observation...

          Did you not ever think that Grassley, or Lyndsey Grahamcracker, could not just be a persona projected by a superior sport hunting extraterrestrial species? I did, and I am not all that crazy. Kavanaugh is from Planet Ten in the Eight Dimension! He will Serve Man! It is a cookbook! And all the Frat sex, same or otherwise.

          Quite, none of this is any more farcical than what I saw being televised of that hearing, in fact, this HPL/Cthulhu/Old Ones/AvP stuff is way more believable than that nonsense...then again, I'm not USian, so the 'not my circus, not my monkeys..' rule applies.