HONOLULU, HAWAII — A team of scientists discovered unusual signals caused by high-energy neutrinos.
Their cause is unknown.
A team of scientists discovered unusual signals caused by high-energy neutrinos using a radio detector called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal submitted on January 6.
ANITA floats above the Antarctic, suspended above the continent's ice sheets by a helium balloon.
ANITA is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos that hit the Antarctic floor and generate radio light.
According to the study, ANITA detected signals that seemed to be caused by extremely high-energy neutrinos behaving in an abnormal way.
Usually high-energy neutrinos come to Earth from space.
However, these detections showed the neutrinos were hitting the antenna at abnormal angles which suggests they had traveled through the planet.
This may mean that the detections could either be physics beyond the Standard Model or a systematic error.
This abnormal behavior has led media outlets to speculate on whether or not this is evidence of a parallel universe.
However, these speculations have not been confirmed.
Peter Gorham from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a principal ANITA researcher, told ScienceAlert, "We have encountered a small number of anomalies in our data, and once we have exhausted all of the possible explanations within the Standard Model of physics, only then is it time to consider other ideas that push those boundaries — we are really not there yet, certainly not at the point where parallel universes are necessary!"
