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An Antarctic weather balloon spotted what looked like a high-energy particle from outer space that hit the ice in 2006. Except that the particle did not touch from above, it went through the planet. Eight years later, this is reproduced.
There is once an event, but two events like this mean that it is something to take seriously. Some scientists think that the signal can come from something explained by the current understanding rules of particle physics. That would be a big problem – a new fundamental particle and, of course, a potential explanation for the dark matter of the Universe.
"It breaks the standard pattern so that a particle with so much energy can travel across the Earth," said Gizmodo Derek Fox, a Penn State physicist who led the most-studied analysis. recent.
Some celestial objects explode cosmic rays of high energy towards the Earth. Their collision with the atmosphere can create a rain of secondary particles or radio signals. There are experiments put in place to observe these signals, such as the experience of the transient Antarctic antenna (ANITA) on a weather balloon. Except that, usually, these particles send a signal to the antenna after hitting the Earth from above, producing a radio signal when they reach Antarctica.
The signals from 2006 and 2014 seemed wrong: they did not have the signature of particles coming from above, but rather those that crossed the Earth, according to a March article. After ruling out potential radio interference and other sources, ANITA scientists determined they had spotted something they called "unusual" – perhaps a particle of energy tens of thousands of times superior to the high energy collisions of the Large Hadron Collider.
Fox and his collaborators analyzed the properties of wild events and presented calculations showing that the textbook of particle physics, called the standard model, could not explain how a particle with so much energy could have crossed the Earth. They published their results on the arXiv physics preprint server, which means that the document has not yet been peer-reviewed.
The team also found evidence corroborating these strange particles in the IceCube experiment buried in the ice of Antarctica. Maybe these IceCube events were high-energy muons, a heavier cousin of the electron, but the Fox team's analysis found this unlikely. Instead, they thought they were seeing even heavier cousins of the muons, called taus. If the signals were pointing upward, they would have been the decay product of another low-interacting particle that could cross the Earth.
This particle would be called stau particle (rhyme with cow), proposed Fox. Some scientists predict that each particle in the standard model, Higgs boson quarks, has a corresponding heavier "supersymmetric" particle partner. The partner of the tau would be called the stau. Some high-energy neutrinos could have interacted with the elements beneath the surface on the other side of the planet, creating staus that traveled across the planet and then transformed into tau. This tau was potentially observed by IceCube and may have produced the radio signal observed by ANITA.
Theoretical physicists had previously predicted the possibility of a stau with properties similar to what ANITA had spotted. A stau with about 500 times the mass of a proton and with the energy observed by ANITA should travel through most of the Earth before disintegrating.
"My simple observer point of view is that if I find a weird phenomenon and think it was predicted by a theoretician before the phenomenon is perceived, it's a big problem for me" Fox said.
A physicist not involved in this analysis, Peter Denton of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, told Gizmodo that Fox's explanation was reasonable. But he thought more research was needed. "I hope that such a model will be explored in more detail in the future."
But given the recent anguish about the fact that the large hadron collider in Geneva, Switzerland has not found new particles since the Higgs boson, as well as the continuous non-detection of dark matter which represents five sixths of the mass of the Universe, physicists are excited by this article.
"While I await peer review before raising my hopes, I take this opportunity to discuss exciting new opportunities with my colleagues," Chanda Prescod-Weinstein told Gizmodo. Professor of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. "Beyond the physics of the standard model, evidence is the dream of any particle theorist, and it can come from anywhere. High energy astrophysics deserves our attention.
Denton wanted to see if other experiments could detect similar results. In addition, there is still work to be done before we can conclude that ANITA has spotted a brand new particle. But it's an enticing result at the limits of physics – and if so, it's almost a gift.
Fox said: "The universe is doing the experiments for us."
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