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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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @07:31AM (3 children)
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email admin@soylentnews.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "0bef6c11d6c74f5556c6543b616c8a41" and "10947ebcb17696f7f5664045e5df7ef9" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP number "50.131.69.18" and your username "fakefuck39".
aah yeah mothafucka. so I'm an idiot in physics after what I vaguely remember was called "physics 3", but I do read a lot of garbage on the crapper. So this is likely a stupid question that also smells bad: what do you mean "shooting neutrinos?" Does this mean we are able to focus and change direction of neutinos? Because I think it means "English is my second language, one which I have not fully mastered." Which is totally cool btw, it's not my first language either.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:22AM
I have often wondered what constituted "bad posting", outside of what pisses off TMB. So I suggest, oh offended AC, that you get an account, and a username, so you can be properly pilloried for bad posting, and probably you should use a VPN or some other device to Keep TMB from knowing who you are. Although, janrinock always knows who you are, even if you post as AC, because he wants to stops all this "bad posting", whatever that means.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @12:32PM
You can't focus them, but if you shoot a high energy beam on a target, the stuff that interacts and creates a bunch of particles all go off generally in the direction of the original beam. If you put a bunch of absorbing material in that path, it stops most of the stuff except for the neutrinos, which aren't bothered with all that stopping material. So you can't focus and aim them, but you can generally spray them in a certain direction like water out of a hose.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday September 30 2018, @10:06PM
How to DIY a neutrino beam [youtube.com] - needs a nice accelerator, a piece of graphite, a magnetic cone and a steel sheet. Mix well and voila, a neutron beam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford