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- Cosmic rays have been discovered from Antarctica.
- To our knowledge, no high-speed particles could penetrate on either side of the earth.
- All the explanations offered are fascinating, especially the most likely one.
Meet ANITA. ANITA means "transient impulsive antenna of the Antarctic". He searches for cosmic rays in space while suspending them from a balloon hanging over Antarctica. In the past two years, however, he has twice detected cosmic rays from a direction that nobody expected: inside Earth. According to Standard model (SM) physics, this should not be possible.
ANITA, in the foreground, and her balloon, background(Science)
And guess what? ANITA is not alone
In September, a paper was submitted for review by astrophysicists at Penn State led by Derek Fox. "I was like," Well, this model does not make much sense, "Fox says. Science live, "but the [ANITA] The result is very intriguing, so I started checking. I started talking to my office neighbor [and paper co-author] Steinn Sigurdsson asked if we could perhaps obtain more plausible explanations than the documents published to date. "In the absence of anything, they looked for other similar events and found three of them, which had been detected by a surface-based Antarctic neutrino detector. Ice Cube. And when the data from ANITA and IceCube were combined, Penn State scientists began to marvel. They calculate that regardless of the type of particle that goes up and away from the Earth, there is less than a 3.5 million chance of being one of the particles predicted by the standard model. Obviously, physicists scratch their heads to try to understand what is happening on earth.
(The University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Ice Cube
How cosmic rays are supposed to behave
First of all, of course, cosmic rays are supposed to come from somewhere, not here. The earth is bombarded with them all the time. The suspicion is that the newly detected particles are cosmic rays that enter the earth on one side and do it in one way or another.
Cosmic rays, however, are high energy particles with relatively wide cross sections that cause them to disappear by crushing them into matter within the Earth. These are "mainly (89%) protons – hydrogen nuclei, the lightest and most common element of the universe – but they also include helium nuclei ( 10%) and heavier nuclei (1%), up to the uranium particles, "according to CERN. Low energy neutrinos, on the other hand, can pass through the rock mass of the earth, but they are not involved in cosmic rays.
ANITA and IceCube both detect neutrinos indirectly by detecting their remains, if you will. They detect particles produced by neutrinos when they disintegrate after the collision. As neutrinos can not cross the earth, however, something else produces these particles. But what?
(Antarctic Glaciers)
Artist's rendition of cosmic rays
They could be a new type of particle …
A candidate proposed as responsible for the event is elusive "sterile neutrinoRevealed for the first time the evidence collected in the mid-1990s with the liquid scintillator neutrino detector (LSND) in Los Alamos. The data has been interpreted as suggesting a strange type of high-speed neutrino that simply passes through matter without any interaction. others could reproduce the result and the idea was rejected. Until last spring, that is when MiniBooNE at FermiLab Chicago captured new signs indicating that it might exist. The sterile neutrino would break the standard model One of the things that make the MiniBoonE data exciting. "It would be huge," said Kate Scholberg, Duke's physicist, who was not involved in the research "… which would require new particles … and a whole new analytical framework."
Others have suggested that this could be a product of black matter. As cool as any of these ideas would be, perhaps the strongest reason for cosmic rays detected upward is even more exciting.
… or they could be supersymmetric particles long sought
According to the standard model, each particle has a symmetrical partner, but the known particles do not match. To solve this apparent imbalance, a class of "supersymmetric" particles thus hidden has been proposed. It was hoped that the large hadron collider could detect these mysterious particles – and so far theoretical – but no. Since 2012, when the last known particle predicted the standard model, the Higgs-Boson was detected, nothing new was found.
Until maybe now.
(DJANDYW.COM)
Inside the Large Hadron Collider
What the Penn newspaper proposes
The Penn State newspaper suggests that these ascending cosmic rays from the South Pole could be our first sign of supersymmetry, especially the tau lepton partner of the standard model. With some "S" added to mean supersymmetry, they would be Stau Sleptons.
Others agree that they could to be the first real proof of supersymmetry. The physicist of Los Alamos, Bill Louis, tells LiveScience"I think it's very compelling," even though he adds that locating a stau slepton is "a bit of an exaggeration."
Fox admits that he certainly can not be sure, but that "from my point of view, I'm going to the trawl to try to discover new things about the universe, I come across a really bizarre phenomenon, then with my colleagues, we do some literature search to see if anyone has ever thought it could happen.And then, if we find articles in the literature, including an article from 14 years ago who predict something like this phenomenon, so that weighs heavily on me. "And, guess what, he found a prediction from 2003 dorms Stau showing just like that.
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