Anita is supposed to look in the other direction.
Anita is supposed to look in the other direction. Not on the ground, but upwards, into space. From there, from the far reaches of the cosmos, all the particles that are interesting for astroparticle physicists usually come. That's why experts at Nasa have built Anita, a detector that floats on a balloon above the South Pole. But in recent years Anita (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna) has discovered two mysterious particles that did not come from above, but from below, from the Antarctic ice.
Perhaps there will be a banal explanation for this. So-called neutrinos, for example, which are almost massless elementary particles without an electrical charge, can cross the entire globe without ever colliding with an atom, and if chance so dictates, they will collide with one in the ice cap of the southern continent. In addition, there are masses of neutrinos, in every second billions of them fly unnoticed through every square centimeter of the earth's surface and also through humans. But the two events Anita has measured are so strange that physicists think a much more exciting explanation is possible: the signature of a new class of elementary particles never before discovered.
The Standard Model has gaps
Particle physicists would not be really shocked by this. They have known for years that their previous model for interpreting the particle world, the so-called Standard Model, has large gaps. The researchers of the microcosm are convinced that there is still much to discover, either in earthly particle accelerators like those at the CERN research center, or in the cosmos, where natural particle accelerators, such as supernovae, produce particles with even higher energies. So has Anita opened the door to new physics?
Several imaginative theories about the two strange measurements have already been published, including the idea that there is a different density distribution of dark matter within the globe than in space. A relatively plausible explanation has just been presented by a group of physicists in a publication that has not yet been peer-reviewed (Arxiv). Astrophysicists of the American Penn State University claim that there have been even more of these strange particle impacts, which apparently came from below from the Earth's interior.
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Perhaps there will be a banal explanation for this. So-called neutrinos, for example, which are almost massless elementary particles without an electrical charge, can cross the entire globe without ever colliding with an atom, and if chance so dictates, they will collide with one in the ice cap of the southern continent. In addition, there are masses of neutrinos, in every second billions of them fly unnoticed through every square centimeter of the earth's surface and also through humans. But the two events Anita has measured are so strange that physicists think a much more exciting explanation is possible: the signature of a new class of elementary particles never before discovered.
The Standard Model has gaps
Particle physicists would not be really shocked by this. They have known for years that their previous model for interpreting the particle world, the so-called Standard Model, has large gaps. The researchers of the microcosm are convinced that there is still much to discover, either in earthly particle accelerators like those at the CERN research center, or in the cosmos, where natural particle accelerators, such as supernovae, produce particles with even higher energies. So has Anita opened the door to new physics?
Several imaginative theories about the two strange measurements have already been published, including the idea that there is a different density distribution of dark matter within the globe than in space. A relatively plausible explanation has just been presented by a group of physicists in a publication that has not yet been peer-reviewed (Arxiv). Astrophysicists of the American Penn State University claim that there have been even more of these strange particle impacts, which apparently came from below from the Earth's interior.
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