Scientists Discover Bizarre Signals Coming From Ice in Antarctica

Some strange radio signals are broadcasting out of Antarctic ice, and the researchers who found them don't know why.

Using a cosmic particle detector, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania detected peculiar signals that, according to a press release, "defy the current understanding of particle physics."

The particle detector that found those strange signals — which is, charmingly, suspended from a bunch of balloons — belongs to a range of instruments known as the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA).

That balloon-based conglomerate generally detects particles reflected onto the ground from space, which made it all the stranger when the Penn researchers found that the signals they were reading seemed to be coming from below the horizon.

According to Stephanie Wissel, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn who also worked on the ANITA team that detected those strange Antarctic pulses, the researchers had been looking for tiny, electric charge-lacking neutrino particles when they stumbled upon the bizarre waves.

"The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles," Wissel said in the press release, "like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice."

Though the particulars of the particle findings were detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers were more candid in the press release about just how stumped they were.

"We still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are," Wissel said, "but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos."

The issue with neutrinos, which are bountiful in the universe but generally emitted by super high-energy sources like supernovae or particle accelerators, is that we don't have very many instruments sensitive enough to detect them — which was why the ANITA team was on the hunt for them in the first place.

"You have a billion neutrinos passing through your thumbnail at any moment, but neutrinos don't really interact," the Penn professor explained. "So, this is the double-edged sword problem. If we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable universe."

After comparing the ANITA readings to other neutrino detectors, the team felt confident that what they were seeing was something different, which was equal parts fascinating and head-scratching.

"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 theorized. "So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries."

With ANITA approaching its 20th birthday, NASA, Penn State, and other institutions have been working on designing a more sensitive balloon-borne instrument to detect particles like neutrinos. Known as Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO), the new detector is both larger and better at detective work for smaller particles.

"I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity," Wissel said. "In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting."

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