"Scientists have detected radio signals from beneath Antarctica that should be physically impossible—and they still have no idea what's causing them. The mysterious pulses are coming from 30 degrees below the ice surface, meaning they somehow traveled through thousands of miles of solid rock without being absorbed.
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment first picked up these anomalous signals between 2016 and 2018. ANITA consists of radio antennas suspended from a NASA balloon flying 25 miles above Antarctica, designed to detect cosmic neutrinos hitting the ice. But instead of normal cosmic ray signals, the detector found something that defies the laws of particle physics.
"The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice," said Penn State researcher Stephanie Wissel, who worked on the ANITA team. "By our calculations, the signal had to pass through thousands of kilometers of rock before reaching the detector, which should have left it undetectable because it would have been absorbed."
The signals aren't neutrinos—scientists have ruled that out completely. When researchers cross-checked with the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, which monitors cosmic rays across 15 years of data, they found no correlating signals that would support a neutrino explanation.
This leaves two disturbing possibilities: either there are exotic new particles that can somehow pass through Earth's core without interacting, or the fundamental laws of particle physics need rewriting. The discovery has been published in Physical Review Letters, one of the most prestigious physics journals.
"It's an interesting problem, because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are," Wissel admits. The team has spent nearly a decade analyzing the data and running simulations, but the signals remain completely unexplained.
The discovery represents one of the biggest mysteries in modern particle physics—radio pulses that exist when they mathematically shouldn't."