Oddball particles tunneling through Earth could point to new physics

Twice in the past 13 years, particles from outer space tunneled through Earth and up into the atmosphere above Antarctica, triggering faint pulses of radio waves that were picked up by a balloon-borne detector 35 kilometers above the ice cap. Those two events poke a hole in physicists’ standard model of fundamental particles and forces, and point to the existence of new particles, a team of astrophysicists argues in a new study.