Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Volga BAM, and I'm here to tell you
Speaker 1: that something strange is happening above the frozen landscape of Antarctica.
Speaker 1: When scientists launched a science balloon mission called the Antarctic
Speaker 1: Impulsive Transient Antenna or ANITA, over the continent in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, a cosmic ray pained off of one
Speaker 1: of its instruments. That isn't so strange. Cosmic rays fly
Speaker 1: from deep space all the time, and ANITA can detect
Speaker 1: them and measure their energies. But on this occasion, the
Speaker 1: cosmic ray didn't come from above. It came from below.
Speaker 1: This high energy particle had emerged from the ice and
Speaker 1: traveled upward through the atmosphere. That's not something that cosmic
Speaker 1: rays are supposed to do. During another in NEEDA flight
Speaker 1: in it happened again. Cosmic rays come from some of
Speaker 1: the most energetic places in the universe supernovas or these
Speaker 1: swirling maws of black holes. To see a cosmic ray
Speaker 1: emerge from the Earth suggests that this particle traveled from
Speaker 1: deep space and passed right through the planet before emerging
Speaker 1: on the other side. According to physics. However, this is impossible.
Speaker 1: Cosmic rays are high energy protons and atomic nuclei, and
Speaker 1: the thing about them is that they have large cross sections.
Speaker 1: In other words, they have no problem interacting with matter.
Speaker 1: Should cosmic ray hit the Earth, it should be stopped
Speaker 1: in its tracks by the atmosphere, like a bullet hitting
Speaker 1: a cinder block. Conversely, we've got another type of particle
Speaker 1: called neutrinos. These have very small cross sections, meaning they
Speaker 1: zip through matter as if it weren't even there. Neutrinos
Speaker 1: are so weakly interacting with matter. The twillions of them
Speaker 1: passed through our bodies unimpeded every second, but the particles
Speaker 1: that are needed. But the particles that are needed detected
Speaker 1: were not neutrinos. They were what appeared to be cosmic rays,
Speaker 1: and they passed straight through our planet as if it
Speaker 1: weren't even there. Frankly, these cosmic rays are not normal. Now.
Speaker 1: Researchers have have revisited these Anita events in a study
Speaker 1: submitted in September and founded three similar detections of upward
Speaker 1: moving cosmic rays. In another Antarctic experiment called ice Cube,
Speaker 1: that's a particle detector that's buried in the ice, and
Speaker 1: the researchers have arrived at an astonishing conclusion. These aren't
Speaker 1: regular Standard model physics cosmic rays. They could be evidence
Speaker 1: of what's called exotic physics. Exotic physics first two physics
Speaker 1: that we don't currently understand, and scientists refer to it
Speaker 1: as physics beyond the Standard Model. The Standard Model is
Speaker 1: a recipe book of sorts that explains how subatomic particles
Speaker 1: from electrons, two photons, two corks should behave. But when
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson in the
Speaker 1: particle that endows matter with mass, the Standard Model was complete.
Speaker 1: The theoretical framework that describes all interactions down to subatomic
Speaker 1: scales had been wrapped up. They're almost there was a problem.
Speaker 1: In fact, there were several. The Standard Model does not
Speaker 1: explain what dark matter and dark energy are. It also
Speaker 1: cannot explain why the majority of the universe is made
Speaker 1: from matter rather than antimatter. There's also the question of
Speaker 1: neutrino mass. The Standard Model falls short there too. There
Speaker 1: are many mysteries that cannot be explained by the Standard
Speaker 1: Model recipe book, so physicists are hard at work trying
Speaker 1: to find evidence for a recipe book that governs the
Speaker 1: universe in the shadows. Maddeningly, the most complex experiments on
Speaker 1: Earth have yet to find any conclusive evidence of this
Speaker 1: shadowy realm and how it works, though there are clues,
Speaker 1: and according to the researchers investigating the Anita and ice
Speaker 1: cube anomalies, these cosmic ray detections may have opened a
Speaker 1: window into physics beyond the standard model, providing evidence of
Speaker 1: particles that look like cosmic rays and yet don't behave
Speaker 1: like cosmic rays. The researchers wrote in their study, under
Speaker 1: conservative extrapolations of these standard model interactions, there's no particle
Speaker 1: that can propagate through the Earth at these energies and
Speaker 1: exit ankles. We explore here whether beyond the standard model
Speaker 1: particles are required to explain the Anita events if correctly interpreted,
Speaker 1: and conclude that they are. One hypothetical exotic physics recipe
Speaker 1: book that may help explain what's going on is supersymmetry.
Speaker 1: This hypothesis suggests that all the particles we know and
Speaker 1: love have supersymmetry particles a k a. Sparticles. These sparticles
Speaker 1: would provide balance to these standard models and may explain
Speaker 1: some of the mysteries that are confounding physicists and cosmologists.
Speaker 1: Could these phantom cosmic rays actually be a whole different
Speaker 1: type of particle emerging from supersymmetry. It's too early to tell,
Speaker 1: and more data is needed, but it's tantalizing to think
Speaker 1: that we may have accidentally glimpsed physics beyond the standard
Speaker 1: model at the most extreme location on Earth. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Ian O'Neill and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other spooky topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.