High above the icy landscape of Antarctica, scientists have detected strange radio signals coming from deep within the ice—signals that don’t match anything we currently understand in particle physics.
The discovery was made by a team working on a project called ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna), which sends a giant balloon equipped with radio antennas to fly 40 kilometers above the continent’s surface, scanning for particles from space.
ANITA is designed to detect neutrinos—tiny, nearly massless particles that are constantly flying through space and even through our bodies, though we don’t feel them.
Neutrinos are incredibly hard to detect because they rarely interact with matter.
That’s what makes ANITA’s job so interesting. When a high-energy neutrino crashes into ice, it can create a burst of radio waves that ANITA can pick up.
But in this case, researchers saw something they didn’t expect. The signals came from deep beneath the ice, at steep angles—about 30 degrees below the surface.
To get to ANITA’s detectors from that direction, the signal would have needed to travel through thousands of kilometers of solid rock, which should have absorbed it.
Yet the radio waves appeared strong and clear, defying the laws of known physics.
Stephanie Wissel, a physics and astronomy professor involved in the study, explained that their calculations show these signals are unlikely to be from neutrinos.
Normally, if a neutrino manages to reach a detector like ANITA, it’s because it has traveled undisturbed across vast distances, possibly from the edge of the observable universe. But these particular signals behave differently and don’t match that pattern.
The researchers have ruled out known particle behaviors by comparing their data with results from other experiments, including the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the Pierre Auger Observatory.
None of these other detectors picked up anything that could explain the strange ANITA signals, which makes them even more puzzling.
Some scientists wonder if this could point to new, undiscovered particles or interactions—possibly even something related to dark matter. But with no solid evidence yet, the true cause remains a mystery.
Wissel and her team are now working on a new and more advanced version of ANITA, called PUEO. This next-generation detector will be more sensitive and may finally help explain what’s behind these bizarre signals. It could also improve our ability to detect neutrinos, which carry valuable information about cosmic events that happened light-years away.
For now, the strange signals coming from beneath Antarctica remain one of the great unanswered questions in modern physics. The team hopes that with better tools and more data, they’ll eventually uncover what’s really going on under the ice—and whether it’s something we’ve never seen before.
Source: Penn State.
