Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna

Context:

In a significant breakthrough, a team of researchers has succeeded in finding “a fountain of high-energy particles erupting from the ice” in Antarctica which according to the researchers could be proof of a parallel universe. The event was recorded by NASA’s ANITA.

What is Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna or ANITA?

• Designed by NASA, the ANITA instrument is a radio telescope that is used to detect ultra-high energy cosmic-ray neutrinos from a scientific balloon flying over Antarctica.
• ANITA, a stratospheric balloon payload flying over the Antarctic, is the first NASA observatory for neutrinos of any kind.

The findings:

• ANITA succeeded in detecting the ‘fountain’ of high-energy particles in 2006 and 2014 but the researchers initially thought of them as background noise or glitches.
• Low-energy, subatomic neutrinos can pass completely through Earth, but higher-energy objects are stopped by solid matter, which means that the high-energy particles can only be detected coming “down” from space.
• But the team’s ANITA detected heavier particles, so-called tau neutrinos, which come “up” out of the Earth, implying that these particles are traveling backward in time, suggesting evidence of a parallel universe.

• What are neutrinos?

• Neutrinos are high-energy particles that pose no threat to us and pass through most solid objects without anyone even noticing.
• Neutrinos constantly bombard Earth and as per some estimates emerging from studies, 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second!
• Rarely do they interact with matter. But if they do smash into an atom, they produce a shower of secondary particles we can detect, which allows us to probe where they came from in the universe.
• ANITA detects neutrinos pinging in from space and colliding with the matter in the Antarctic ice sheet.