Back in 2006, scientists launched the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment on a large balloon in an attempt to track neutrinos (a sub-atomic particle) as they bounce off the ice and create radio waves.
However, a strange thing happened. One of the particles seemed to come straight up through the planet. Then eight years later, it happened again.
Scientists now realize those radio waves aren't emanating from the ice at all.
They were coming from far, far deeper.
The unusually sharp angle of the anomalous signals ruled out the possibility that they were coming from ice-interacting neutrinos or the tau leptons they produce.
ANITA detected these signals at ‘really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' co-author Stephanie Wissel, an associate professor of physics at Penn State, said in a university statement. This suggests that the radio pulses traveled up through 6,000 to 7,000 kilometers (3,700 to 4,300 miles) of solid rock to reach the detector — which shouldn't be possible.
According to all our current models, even of particle physics, those radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock long before they reached the surface.
The scientists have no idea what that means, except that they definitely have not found the neutrinos. They do have a plan though:
At Penn State, Wissel's team is designing and building the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observation (PUEO) mission. This new detector will be larger and better at detecting neutrino signals, according to Wissel.
She's already forming an early hypothesis about the nature of these anomalies. 'My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs 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,' Wissel said.
What do you think is making those radio waves?
Coming from that deep in the Earth, I'll place my bet on AC/DC.
Though there are older and fouler things than '70s rock bands in the deep places of the world!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
