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Related: About this forumBizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | September 26, 2018 08:16pm ET
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.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/63692-standard-model-broken-supersymmetry-new-physics.html
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Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics (Original Post)
Judi Lynn
Sep 2018
OP
I'm certain that we know only a tiny fraction of the physics behind our universe.
Snarkoleptic
Sep 2018
#3
Bayard
(22,117 posts)1. Amazing
And mysterious.
AJT
(5,240 posts)2. What a fun thing to be investigating.
Snarkoleptic
(5,998 posts)3. I'm certain that we know only a tiny fraction of the physics behind our universe.
Oh, to skip forward 100 years and see how far the knowledge base has advanced.*
*assuming the earth is livable in 100 years.
Roland99
(53,342 posts)4. The Atlantis Gene
YOHABLO
(7,358 posts)5. God I hope it's not trapped methane. We're in big trouble.
Mustellus
(328 posts)6. Ok.. takes out my PhD in Physics and dusts it off....
In quantum mechanics energy = Planck's constant times the speed of light divided by the wavelength
E = h c / lambda
A big energy means a tiny wavelength. And most neutrinos ... have virtually zero cross section for interaction with normal matter. They are created in the core of the sun, and leave at the speed of light. It would take millions of stars.. end to end.. to stop most of them.
They shine down on our heads during the day.. and up through the soles of our feet at night.
Something got lost in translation here.
Dr. Mustellus