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In Brief
- Thunderclouds emit gamma rays in powerful, millisecond-long bursts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, first discovered by space observatories.
- These bursts can also produce beams of electrons and even of antimatter that can travel halfway around the globe.
- All proposed explanations for the phenomena involve strong electric fields unleashing avalanches of electrons inside clouds, but none fully accounts for the sheer energies of the gamma rays.
- New dedicated space missions and research aircraft may solve the mystery, as well as find out if the flashes pose radiation exposure risks for airline flights.
Soon after the space shuttle atlantis launched a new observatory into orbit in 1991, Gerald Fishman of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center realized that something very strange was going on. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), designed to detect gamma rays from distant astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and supernova remnants, had also begun recording bright, millisecond-long bursts of gamma rays coming not from outer space but from Earth below.
Astrophysicists already knew that exotic phenomena such as solar flares, black holes and exploding stars accelerate electrons and other particles to ultrahigh energies and that these supercharged particles can emit gamma rays—the most energetic photons in nature. In astrophysical events, however, particles accelerate while moving almost freely in what is essentially a vacuum. How, then, could particles in Earth's atmosphere—which is certainly nowhere close to being a vacuum—be doing the same thing?
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13 Comments
Add CommentI entered the URL at the end of the article and it brought up a very good video about how cosmic rays could possibly trigger lightening. However there was no content about how thunderstorms generate gamma-ray bursts. Further the article in the August issue did not mention cosmic ray triggering of lightening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI prefer the concept that the started with Kristian Birkeland, 100 years ago: Solar electric currents are directly responsible for all our atmospheric activity. The sprite is just the upper-most indication of the enormous extent of these fantastic discharges. The Earth's insulating double layers are just like capacitor dielectrics which break down under stress.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProf. Gerald Pollack has shown in the lab that water behaves like a plasma/ liquid crystal and clouds must be electrically maintained, by solar-originated power. So why are Dwyer and Smith still in the dark ages?
We have been led to believe that thunder is the after math or results of lightning when in fact the opposite is true!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThunder (the collapse of air cells) creates the energy of what we call lightning.
Thunder happens first!
Sound travels much faster than light !
The sound that we play around with is leftover energy of reactions that have magnetically regrouped into larger chips (molecules). This leftover energy is just one in many that an air cell absorbs at it’s nucleus!
Considering new technology, and I was listening from the Moon “I would hear your hum or whistle before you would!”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=living-in-a-quantum-world
to Mr.Bruce Voigt; Did you say "Sound travels much faster than light !"?.... Dang! I hate it when the only post a "Preview"!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you referring to this "Prof. Gerald Pollack"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Dr. Gerald Pollack, UW professor of bioengineering, has developed a theory of water that has been called revolutionary. The researcher has spent the past decade convincing worldwide audiences that water is not actually a liquid."
He apparently simply does not consider that cosmic rays can and do produce high energy interactions with particles in the upper atmosphere, stating that all the energy affecting atmospheric water comes from the Sun...
Even if you accept his conclusions drawn from laboratory experiment results, it has not been shown that those laboratory conditions commonly occur in the atmosphere. Looks a lot like metaphysics to me...
BTW, this Gerald Pollack is closely associated with mercola.com, a commercial site that offers probiotics, tanning beds, cookware and now Krill oil for pets...
Yes, I believe I discovered GP on Dr Mercola. Some good advice amongst all the sales stuff. He is very anti-flouride too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"..water is not actually a liquid." I think you'll find that GP is not the first to present this theory. We have to ask ourselves what is a liquid? It's a lot more complex than I ever realised: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/anmlies.html#F1 and another:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=ILSyt_Hhbjg.
Have you discovered the source of cosmic rays then? The sun surely is the closest 'source' of electricity in the solar system, although it is probably only transforming another source itself.
Owing to the 'anomalous' range of temperatures and pressure at which water remains in its liquid state, water is by far the must abundant liquid humans normally encounter. As I understand, most atoms and molecules can exist in a liquid state. In fact, it's likely most of the material comprising the Earth is liquid, in its mantle and core.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, since in human experience water is the most common liquid, it's properties are most commonly considered to represent the standard for a liquid. My dictionary defines liquid as neither gas nor solid; flowing like water. From this perspective it can actually be argued that it is the properties of other liquids that are anomalous.
Certainly water's many very special properties are crucial for the development of especially complex life on Earth.
Thanks for the link to
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/
but I didn't find any statement there that water is not a liquid. Of course, water that is frozen or vaporized is not a liquid...
The question of where cosmic rays originate is also more complex than it might seem. As stated by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays
"The obscure mechanism of cosmic ray production at galactic distances is partly a result of the fact that (unlike other radiations) magnetic fields in our galaxy and other galaxies bend cosmic ray direction severely, so that they arrive nearly randomly from all directions, hiding any clue of the direction of their initial sources. Cosmic rays can have energies of over 1020 eV, far higher than the 1012 to 1013 eV that Terrestrial particle accelerators can produce."
Th Sun may be the nearest source of charged particles, but as I understand, it (and other stars, even supenovae) cannot produce the highest energy cosmic rays. The cosmic rays from the Sun are relatively low-energy particles from Solar flares.
I have yet to actually read the article previewed here - I'm looking forward to it!
Having now read the full article in print, I was very pleased to find a very interesting allegorical account of recent major discoveries in the field of lightning research. IMO, this is one of the best articles I've read in Scientific American in the past several years - reminding me of the excellent articles found in Scientific American during the 1960s-1980s.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks very much!
P.S. I'm not related to the author.
Reeeally???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWonder what this really means wrt airline travel. I am fully aware of the fact that on average (i.e. far away from any thunderstorm) all of these phenomena are part of the radiation background that has been measured at such altitude over and again. But no flight is just in or out of these clouds. Given the number of flights and thunderstorms every day, flights close to them in FL which I have witnessed myself from onboard, and the fact that the real particle trajectories have hardly been measured ... I simply wonder. Could it be that passengers' and crew' exposure to high energy rads cannot be calculated as a simple function of flight time and altitude any more ? Airlines have no equipment and no requirements to measure such events onboard. Throw in competition, fuel policies and ignorance (think AF447). The article plays it down and I don't want to make it up. But I would love to see some rational arguments why this can't be a problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAntimatter is the subconscious mind and consciousness of all living entities in different parallel multiverse universes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgoogle crestroy
Good point, I think. Why not suggest that at least high altitude jets be equipped with monitoring equipment to determine the actual exposure of, especially, the crew. Of course, frequent flyers are also at risk - it would even be possible to account for each passenger's exposure, along with freight, etc...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is really interesting, as I have the idea that the missing antimatter in the universe is everywhere. The reason it doesn't annijilate is bacause it is located in parallel universes, with the same space and time as we have in the physical universe. Check me out at www.crestroy.com if you wish.
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