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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: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:18AM (2 children)
Maybe it is a downwards traveling particle going backward in time.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday September 30 2018, @01:24PM (1 child)
i love that idea although it's a bit hard to imagine. Wouldn't that mean the tachyon started out each at the balloon's antenna, or, more likely, above it?
This makes me want to know how they determine the direction a cosmic ray striking the antenna. Looking at the photo here [wikipedia.org], it's an array of antennae so I guess they just go by which direction the one that picked up the signal was facing, or would there be enough of a time delay between it striking two of the antennae to determine direction?
In the paper, they suggest an stau slepton (like being slept on? ;) ) which is predicted by supersymmetry.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday September 30 2018, @10:09PM
RTFAing a bit, it looks like they are detecting the shower of secondary particles when one of these hits. So, an energetic particle moving backwards in time comes down from space, hits something and gets knocked into normal time. Conservation of momentum means the collision products are going up.
I suppose it also could be a particle with negative mass. That would be awesome, negative mass could give you a starship drive.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.