Strange ice formations may have tricked physicists into seeing mysterious particles that weren't there
What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion?
Since March 2016, two mysterious signals from Antarctica have baffled researchers. Twice now, a high-energy particle has seemed to burst straight up out of the ice, tripping detectors on a balloon-borne experiment floating overhead. It's as if the particles had passed through the entire Earth unscathed. But that should be all but impossible: None of the known particles, which collectively are described in a physics model known as the Standard Model, can make that trip at high-energy levels. ...
Physicists termed the two detections the "ANITA anomaly," after NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), the airborne detector that picked up the signals. They compared ANITA's findings to results from IceCube — a much larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica — and found more support for the notion that they had found something no one had seen before. And they took seriously the idea that ANITA might have stumbled onto something beyond the Standard Model.
Now, in a new paper published April 24 in the journal Annals of Glaciology, a joint team of physicists and glaciologists argue that the ANITA anomaly likely isn't evidence for new physics. Instead, it may simply be a trick of the ice. Complex, hidden structures in the white expanse might have reflected radio waves in unexpected ways, fooling ANITA's radio receivers into registering the particle as if it were coming from inside Earth. ...