STEM News: ANITA's Discovery

What do you think of the idea of parallel universes? Do you think they exist or are they just science fiction elements? Recently, with the help of ANITA, NASA scientists discovered something interesting.

- Who is ANITA?

ANITA is not a person. ANITA is an acronym for "The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna". It is an experiment that is partially funded by NASA. It is a helium balloon with antennas that hovers over the white Antarctic landscape, which was created to detect neutrinos and Askaryan radiation (secondarily charged particle showers when the high-energy neutrinos hit the ice). Neutrinos are ghost-like particles. These flow through everything we can find! However, they do not interact with "normal" matter - which makes them extremely difficult to discover. When these are generated by extremely powerful astronomical sources such as supernovae, they become energetic and interact with ordinary matter.

Recently ANITA detected strange particles which defy the laws of physics. Scientists working at ANITA said that they had found anomalies in their data and these cannot be explained by the standard model of particle physics. They found upward-pointing cosmic ray-like events. Scientists believed that these came from a parallel universe where time and many other things run backwards.

These events were definitely interesting. However, the news is fake. It would help in further research though. How awe-inspiring it would be if it were a reality!