The discovery was made using ANITA, which stands for Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. It’s a special setup of instruments that are flown on balloons high above Antarctica. The goal is to detect radio waves that are created when cosmic rays hit our planet’s atmosphere.
To dig deeper into what might be going on, researchers sent equipment up into the sky on a giant balloon — flying it about 40 kilometers (or 29 miles) above the Earth. From there, they could gather more data about the cosmic events happening all around the universe.
They had chosen Antarctica for this study specifically because it’s one of the quietest places on Earth when it comes to outside radio signals. That made it a perfect spot to look for cosmic activity without a lot of background noise.
Stephanie Wissel, one of the scientists involved in the study, explained that their mission had been to track down a particle known as a neutrino when they picked up these odd signals instead.
Neutrinos are an important piece of the cosmic puzzle and can help us understand how the universe works. But they’re incredibly hard to detect. These radio waves shouldn’t have shown up the way they did. They would have needed to pass through thousands of kilometers of rock and that should have absorbed them entirely.
Wissel also added that right now, there could be billions of neutrinos passing through our bodies. But because they rarely interact with matter, we never feel or notice them.
Still, when the researchers sent their balloon up and later cross-checked the new data with findings from two earlier experiments, the results didn’t line up. This created even more questions than answers.
All signs started pointing to the idea that what they had found might not have been neutrinos at all, but possibly something else entirely.
In a press release where the findings were discussed, Wissel shared this insight: “My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effects occur near ice and also near the horizon that I don’t fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven’t been able to find any of those yet either.”
The full study and its results have since been published in the journal Physical Review Letters, where researchers hope others will help dig deeper into the mystery.