ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)

• 03 Jul 2020

• It is an experiment by NASA involving an array of radio antennas attached to a helium balloon which flies over the Antarctic ice sheet at 37,000 meters.
• The height is important here to shut out all other "noises" so that the ANITA antennas can "listen" to the cosmos and detect high-energy particles, known as neutrinos, which constantly bombard the planet.
• 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 matter in the Antarctic ice sheet.

Over the years, ANITA has detected a handful of "anomalous" events. Instead of the high-energy neutrinos streaming in from space, they seem to have come from a strange angle, through the Earth's interior, before hitting the detector. These findings can't be explained by our current understanding of physics.