| Title | Ice, Ice, Maybe: Neutrino Anomalies in Antarctica Explained by Virginia Tech's Ian Shoemaker | |
| Date | Thursday June 11 2020, @04:43AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the cool-discovery dept. | ||
Ice, ice, maybe: Neutrino anomalies in Antarctica explained by physics' Ian Shoemaker:
A new research paper co-authored by a Virginia Tech assistant professor of physics provides a new explanation for two recent strange events that occurred in Antarctica – high-energy neutrinos appearing to come up out of the Earth on their own accord and head skyward.
The anomalies occurred in 2016 and 2018 and were discovered by scientists searching for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from space, all tracked by an array of radio antennas attached to a balloon floating roughly 23 miles above the South Pole. Neutrinos are exceedingly small particles, created in a number of ways, including exploding stars and gamma ray bursts. They are everywhere within the universe and are tiny enough to pass through just about any object, from people to lead to buildings and the Earth itself.
[...] Ian Shoemaker, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Center for Neutrino Physics, both part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, has a different, simpler explanation. In a recent paper published in the journal Annals of Glaciology, Shoemaker and several colleagues posit that the anomalies are not from neutrinos, but are merely unflipped reflections of the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays that arrive from space — miss the top layer ice — then enter the ground, striking deep, compacted snow known as firn.
[...] Shoemaker added that, "When cosmic rays, or neutrinos, go through ice at very high energies, they scatter on materials inside the ice, on protons and electrons, and they can make a burst of radio, a big nice radio signal that scientists can see. The problem is that these signals have the radio pulse characteristic of a neutrino, but [appear] to be traversing vastly more than is possible given known physics. Ordinary neutrinos just don't [do] this. But cosmic rays at these energies are common occurrences and have been seen by many, many experiments."
Journal Reference:
Ian M. Shoemaker, Alexander Kusenko, Peter Kuipers Munneke, et al. Reflections on the anomalous ANITA events: the Antarctic subsurface as a possible explanation [open], Annals of Glaciology (DOI: 10.1017/aog.2020.19)
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