A new study posits that this muon might be the result of a dark matter particle that decayed as it passed through the Earth, which would also explain why the IceCube Observatory in the South Pole hasn’t detected any such particle. “It opens up a new way you can really test dark matter,” Bhupal Dev, lead author of the study from Washington University, said to New Scientist . The researchers tried to recreate a dark matter scenario that KM3NeT could detect, but IceCube could not. “We propose a novel solution to this conundrum in terms of dark matter (DM) scattering in the Earth’s crust,” the paper reads. “We show that intermediate dark-sector particles that decay into muons are copiously produced when high-energy (∼100 PeV) DM propagates through a sufficient amount of Earth overburden.”Related Story Dark Matter Could Unlock a Limitless Energy SourceSo, the high-energy particle wasn’t directly a dark matter particle, but rather a muon that decayed from dark matter likely fired from a blazar (a type of active galactic nucleus) right at Earth.