00:00Antarctic balloon detects mysterious radio signals from below Earth.
00:05A NASA balloon over Antarctica picked up signals that should not have been coming from where they came from.
00:11That is the mystery.
00:13The experiment was called ANITA, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna.
00:18It flew high above the ice, listening for radio waves from powerful cosmic particles.
00:24Normally, these signals should come from above, or bounce off the ice in ways scientists can understand.
00:31But ANITA detected strange radio pulses that seemed to come from below the horizon,
00:36almost as if something had passed through the Earth and shot upward through the Antarctic ice.
00:42That is where the word impossible came from.
00:45Under normal physics, particles traveling through thousands of kilometers of rock
00:50should be absorbed before reaching the detector.
00:52If the signals were neutrinos, they would have had to survive a journey that current models struggle to explain.
00:59For a while, the possibilities sounded wild.
01:03New particles.
01:04Unknown interactions.
01:07Physics beyond the standard model.
01:09But science does not stop at strange data.
01:13Researchers compared the ANITA anomalies with years of observations from the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina,
01:19one of the world's major cosmic ray detectors.
01:22And the result made the mystery colder, not clearer.
01:27The matching signals were not found.
01:30That means the ANITA events are still unexplained,
01:33but scientists are now more cautious about calling them proof of new physics.
01:37They are most likely not ordinary neutrinos.
01:41They are probably not evidence of aliens.
01:44They are not a decoded message from under the ice.
01:48They are something harder and more interesting.
01:51A real anomaly.
01:53A signal that forced scientists to question their instruments,
01:57the ice, particle behavior, and the limits of what we know.
02:01Antarctica did not give up the answer.
02:04It gave scientists a puzzle.
02:06And sometimes, one unexplained signal from the ice is enough to make physics look twice.
02:12The ice is enough to make physics look twice.
02:12The ice is enough to make physics look twice.
02:12The ice is enough to make physics look twice.
02:12The ice is enough to make physics look twice.
02:13The ice is enough to make physics look twice.
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