Strange events at the South Pole are more easily explained by new physics, says says Derek Fox, an observational astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University. Like the opening scene of a Hugo-winning science fiction novel, scientists have detected a mystery particle shooting into space from deep beneath the ancient South Polar ice cap. It appears to be a high-energy particle that’s traveled through space, for billions of years crashed into the Earth, and back out again defying what physicists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. But cosmic rays shouldn’t do that, scientists began to wonder whether these mysterious beams are made of particles never seen before.
