Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice

https://www.livescience.com/63692-standard-model-broken-supersymmetry-new-physics.html

by daegloe • 8 years ago

232 80 8 years ago

crazynick4• 8 years ago

If I understand correctly, these particles are entering the earth from space around, say, the North Pole, and the coming out the other side in Antarctica?

If so, is it only out of Antarctica? Would that mean they are coming from a specific direction in space?

Why can't we observe them simply as they come out of space? Is there something about the process of moving through the earth that makes them more detectable?

These may be stupid questions, feel free to vote this down..

Edit: if I understand correctly it seems like it's happenstance and ANITA just happened to be above Antarctica when the cosmic rays shot up through it on those particular occasions, I think

gog-ma-gog• 8 years ago

It’s also a matter of signal to noise. Not very many things (other than neutrinos) are detectable when you point a detector straight down into the earth. Contrariwise, you’re swamped with signal when you point a detector at space.

Gibbon12• 8 years ago

I think it's because both detectors are using the deep ice sheet as part of neutrino detection experiments.

ANITA is listening for Askaryan radiation created by neutrino's traveling through ice (from the wiki, I know as much as you). And IceCube is looking for flashes of light created when a neutrino interacts with ice.

cozzyd10• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: I work on ANITA. Also I need to go to bed, so I'm writing this really fast so it probably doesn't make sense.

ANITA is a radio telescope attached to a balloon looking for broaband impulsive radio emission in Antarctica.

The main purpose is to look for the Askaryan emission from neutrinos interacting in the ice. The Askaryan emission is just the coherent version of the same process (Cerenkov radiation) that produces the flashes of light in IceCube (basically at long wavelengths you can't resolve the charges in a cascade and see a fast moving current density-- there's a negative charge excess because positrons can annihilate with atomic electrons). To detect this Askaryan emission, you need a dense dielectric material (if not dense, no target mass, if not dielectric, then RF won't propagate). Antarctica happens to be both the place you do long duration ballooning (due to all-day sunlight and favorable wind patterns that keep you over land) and the place with the most ice.

However, the events discussed here were produced by another channel. ANITA can also see RF emission from cosmic-ray extensive air showers (EAS). The RF emission here mostly comes from the splitting of charges in the showers by the Earth's magnetic field. Because in Antarctica, the magnetic field is approximately vertical, this produces horizontally polarized emission. Because ANITA is so high up (~40 km), EAS development from cosmic rays occurs below the payload, so the most common way for us to observe EAS's from cosmic rays is for the emission to bounce off the ice (because it's very forward-beamed). We can also see atmosphere-skimming showers that miss the ice entirely. As expected, the events that bounce off the ice have a polarity flip compared to the events that miss the ice.

The strange events discussed here look like EAS's from air showers, but the RF emission clearly points at the ice and there is no polarity flip from reflection, so the events look like very-energetic upward going air showers. There's no good way to explain upward going air showers in the Standard Model at these energies and observed angle (at lower energies or more grazing angles, tau neutrinos make it through the earth, which can decay to make upward-going air showers). So either there is something wrong with the measurement (we can't think of anything, but we're trying!), we got really unlucky with anthropogenic backgrounds (we think this is very unlikely), or there might be some new physics.

For this detection channel, there isn't too much special about Antarctica, just that we're on a balloon looking down so we can see stuff coming from below. The ice could potentially offer a slight enhancement compared to rock, but that's probably not so important. Other observatories looking for upward going showers from tau neutrinos (Pierre Auger) only look at very grazing incidence. There are proposals using fluorescence instead of radio emission (e.g. JEM-EUSO, and the SPB-EUSO balloon mission) that could do more or less the same thing.

garmaine2• 8 years ago

If so, is it only out of Antarctica?

That's the only place there are detectors.

DavidSJ2• 8 years ago

I ask in ignorance, but: could these particles actually have come from space in the normal way (i.e. from above the South Pole) and then just been reflected back up from several meters or so below the surface? That would, on its face, seem to resolve the question about strong vs. weak interaction: they’d be strongly interacting particles that happened to interact and ricochet straight back.

cozzyd10• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: I work on ANITA

The particles can't be reflected like that. We do see reflected radio emission from (presumably) cosmic ray air showers, but the polarity of the signal undergoes a sign flip on reflection. These signals are peculiar because they are definitely coming from the ice but don't have the sign flip one would expect for a reflection.

DavidSJ2• 8 years ago

Thanks for the answer! Apologies if this question betrays my ignorance further, but what would happen if a signal were reflected twice? Would the polarity flip back?

dooglius• 8 years ago

How do you know what the original polarity was?

jakeogh• 8 years ago

paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05218.pdf

mhandley• 8 years ago

That's the 2016 Anita paper. There's also a newer Anita paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05088. The new paper described in the article is this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09615

M_Bakhtiari2• 8 years ago

Ultraghiaccio, perhaps?

Romano Scarpa fans should know what I'm talking about.

M_Bakhtiari2• 8 years ago

Hmm...looks like I'd better stick to yankee cultural references in the future.

audunw• 8 years ago

Ah, must be the second Stargate ;)

negamax• 8 years ago

Isn't Earth like a giant rotating magnet? That should create some weird things. Wears sci-fi cap!

fabatka2• 8 years ago

and it could break physics as we know it.

Stopped reading there. I hate that a lot of pop-science articles suggest that the foundations of natural sciences are so shaky that a new finding can turn them upside-down. I've lived together with 50-60 social scientists in a small community during my student years, and I found that they don't have the slightest idea about how thoroughly e.g. special and general relativity have been tested in controlled experiments and every day when they use gps in their smartphones. For them these theories may be true, but who knows? I find it really sad that media that are supposed to bring sciences closer to non-scientists fail this way.

EDIT: added last sentence

Moodles• 8 years ago

I agree. It is frustrating. These journalists have an incentive to make their articles as sensational as possible.

baq• 8 years ago

this writeup by cozzyd just below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082370 is much better and is exactly why I start reading HN links comments first :)

garmaine2• 8 years ago

Well, maybe you shouldn't have stopped reading. A particle that is not described by the standard model DOES "break physics as we know it." That phrasing is typical of science journalism hyperbole, but it is accurate in this case.

fabatka2• 8 years ago

Perhaps my exact point didn't get through well. I find that exactly this kind of phrasing is what's bad, because I fear that it isn't interpreted as "new physics" or "overhalued physics" as in cozzyd's or SideburnsOfDoom's comments, but rather "look, scientists from Newton through Einstein were proved wrong". And the big issue is when this is followed by the thought "How can we know scientists aren't wrong about [insert issue here]?"

empath75• 8 years ago

There are like dozens of hypothesized particles outside of the standard model. The standard model is not the be all and end all of physics as we know it.

ramblerman• 8 years ago

There are no more 'revolutions' left for physics? And I'm not talking about tomorrow but imagine a 1000 years from now. It seems a bit arrogant to assume that.

I also dislike the pseudo pop-science, but the visceral close mindedness is just another side of that coin imo.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 8 years ago

"overhauled" is not the same as "broken". It's bit arrogant to assume that all those GPS measurements that pinpoint our location will one day be proven wildly incorrect. They clearly aren't. They might be refined, but are not all that wrong. Even Newtonian physics is under many circumstances a close approximation of reality.

Further reading from Dr Asimov: https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...

living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured.

ConceptJunkie• 8 years ago

There are no more 'revolutions' left for physics?

Sounds like how people were talking around the turn of the last century. Then came special and general relativity and quantum physics in about 20 years' time. Not to mention similar revolutions in math.

y04nn• 8 years ago

I agree, this is annoying, but this looks like an editor addition. The title should say 'contradict supersymmetry theory'.

nwatson• 8 years ago

It's just evidence for the existence of hell. Dante's Inferno is a physics treatise.

tiborsaas• 8 years ago

a lot of pop-science articles suggest that the foundations of natural sciences are so shaky that a new finding can turn them upside-down

Dark matter, Dark energy, The cosmological constant problem [1], Quantum entanglement, Quantum gravity...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

The foundations are shaky. Of course it's an easy rhetoric tool to use by journalists, but often they are not wrong, if those claims turn out to be true.

dogma11384• 8 years ago

The standard model is anything but shaky at the moment.

whatshisface2• 8 years ago

That's not so much a crack in the foundation as it is a patch of dirt next to the foundation.

To get an idea of what happens to old physics when new physics is discovered, realize that Newton's laws are still correct, and can be derived from QM. That's what you get when you do a good job of actually checking the truth with experiments. All theories have implicit tolerances embedded within the known precision of the experiments used to confirm them, and with these tolerances you can say "Newton's laws are right" without denying other, finer details. Similarly, scientists 1000 years from now will agree with everything we presently know about the Standard Model, because all of our beliefs are tempered by how closely we know our experiments are looking.

Quantum entanglement

I should add that entanglement isn't "shaky" at all, it was predicted from the start and has been observed in countless experiments to date.

crispyambulance• 8 years ago

    > and it could break physics as we know it.

It's just a case of provocative phrasing to hook the reader.

The rest of the article is interesting, does NOT make out-sized claims and even references source material in arxiv for those who are interested.

You're expecting too much from a popular science article!

kamaal• 8 years ago

Nothing to take away from your point, but the harsh fact about much of physics especially the modern kind is built on 'Models'. Most of it still remains true in that Model, even if a new Model shows totally different set of truths.

Albert Einstein himself said this about Entropy:

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thermodynamics#Second_Law_of_T...

newsbinator2• 8 years ago

Physicists would love for some observation to end up breaking physics as we know it.

They know that 99,999/100,000 times something strange is observed, it turns out to be no big deal.

The day something breaks the Standard Model, physicists will cheer and begin a beautiful renaissance... and another... and another.

But can intelligent creatures in a simulation ever understand the scope and rules on which their simulation is based? Or can they only get closer and closer to the substrate, with a hard limit on ever modeling the details?

lokedhs• 8 years ago

The answer is no. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is interesting here as it states that within a given axiomatic system, there are facts that are true but not provable within that same axiomatic system.

Another way to think about it is that if we are part of a set of fundamental rules that make up a simulation, it's impossible for us to prove everything about that system.

nonbel• 8 years ago

Doesnt general relativity only predict the right thing if you allow for 90% of the universe to be made of dark matter/energy that is only detectable as deviations from from the predictions of GR?

raattgift• 8 years ago

No. (No, it predicts right things locally; no, dark energy is not in conflict with GR; and probably no on the scale of galaxies, with some assumptions).

We can (and do) test General Relativity to exquisite precision in the solar system.

Those tests constrain the local density of any sort of effectively undetectable matter which includes among other things the (thermal) cosmic neutrino background, lots and lots of relativistic neutrinos, and a fair amount of ultrarelativistic neutrinos (like those that ANITA studies).

Effective undetectability is a function of current technology versus the goodness of estimate of (high) flux of the particles; we can spot small numbers of GZK-interaction neutrinos (with various observatories, including ANITA), we can spot small numbers of Super-KK neutrinos (mostly because we know the path they follow), we can spot small numbers of solar neutrinos (there are A LOT of them and we also know what direction they're coming from), but we have no real hope right now of spotting relic neutrinos (since as we take the momentum to zero, we lose the ability to spot recoil interactions; the emitted photons get drowned out by the CMB; the cosmic neutrinos are also travelling in random directions, like the cosmic photons).

If we take the local density of any of these neutrinos way up, their gravitational effects in the solar system (and indeed in similar systems we can study with various different telescopes) will be pronounced, and straightforward to study with General Relativity.

We do see pronounced gravitational effects at the scale of galaxies; one way to explain them is to add a thin dust of slow-moving mass where the dust motes remain on extremely stable orbits (implying no heating from (photon) radiation, no cooling by emitting (dark? photon? whatever) radiation, and no collisions with ordinary matter dust).

Dark matter is extremely sparse at the scale of star systems -- but then star systems are extremely sparse at the scale of large galaxies! (Likewise, the interstellar medium is extremely sparse, but there's a lot of space among the stars!) Low-interaction is easy enough; Earth is highly opaque to ultrarelativistic neutrinos, but as you take the momentum of the neutrinos down, Earth becomes highly transparent to them (so do telescopes and other instruments, alas, which is why they are hard to observe). (Standard-model) neutrinos are too light to stay in the places where the gravitational effects are observed -- gravitational interactions with the ordinary mass of the galaxy would kick them away. So something else is needed. The question is what, microscopically, it is. However, wishing the gravitational effects away doesn't work, and neither does modifying General Relativity (at least not so far).

In the standard cosmology, Dark Energy is precisely a component of the Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity (it's literally \Lambda, the cosmological constant). So it is entirely the opposite of being in conflict with General Relativity. The research question is mainly why it takes on the value it does, and whether it does so in any sort of spacetime-position-dependent way.

v_lisivka• 8 years ago

Michelson-Morley experiment was did with precision of up to 1E-17(!) and found nothing. Distance to Alpha-Centaur is just 4E16 meters. But then LIGO performed roughly the same experiment with precision of 1E-18 and found waves.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

One of the reasons that many 'pop-science articles' get things wrong is that they're seldom written by scientists. Scientists who venture into popular writing can be looked down on as 'glory-hounds' by their colleagues. (E.g., George Gamow.)

So it's not entirely the journalist's fault if they don't have the credentials to simplify things adequately without distorting something.

8note• 8 years ago

Hey now, not that long ago, we assumed that the universe had C, P, and T symmetry, but after looking closely at the weak force, have found that our universe only maybe has CPT symmetry. We could still find out that CPT symmetry is bunk.

deytempo2• 8 years ago

It’s obviously a UFO buried under the ice. Molder proved they are down there.

cozzyd10• 8 years ago

That's where GWAR came from, right?

MisterTea• 8 years ago

If a certain Mr. Martini was spotted in the vicinity who is also in possession of large quantity of crack cocaine, then yes.

torgian• 8 years ago

Maybe it's alien transmissions that are using the Earth as a gigantic radio booster. XD

one can dream...

JBReefer• 8 years ago

Rogue ICMP packets performing a reflection attack on those schmucks on Mars

Zenst• 8 years ago

What angle are these particles hitting the detector as it may well be possible these are particles are not traveling thru the entire planet and just a traveling in a chord (a line thru a circle that does not pass thru the centre) and as such, traveling thru far less of the planet.

Then there is the aspect that due to the size and the stated interaction with other matter that they are deflected from their original trajectory and could very well appear to be arising from directly below, giving the appearance of passing right thru the planet when they are not.

So very much possibly explained with what we already know about said particles.

Iem6gaoc• 8 years ago

Do you think the scientists overlooked the geometries involved?

cozzyd10• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: I work on ANITA

The two relevant events had RF emission from 27 and 35 degrees below the horizontal. If interpreted as emission from upward-going EAS, then the particle would be within a degree or so of that. So they don't go all the way through the Earth, but through a chord long enough that, if our shower energy estimate (which, admittedly, is fraught with peril, we have an order of magnitude errors on that), no standard model particle could have made it through (yes, at high energies, the Earth is opaque to neutrinos).

Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice

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