{"id":10108,"date":"2024-02-05T18:03:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T22:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zobi.alcowep.com\/bourtagshdrevxnls658739\/whats-made-in-a-thunderstorm-and-faster-than-lightning-gamma-rays\/"},"modified":"2024-02-05T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2024-02-05T22:03:58","slug":"whats-made-in-a-thunderstorm-and-faster-than-lightning-gamma-rays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zobi.alcowep.com\/bourtagshdrevxnls658739\/whats-made-in-a-thunderstorm-and-faster-than-lightning-gamma-rays\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!"},"content":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!<\/h2>\n

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3 min read<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our\u202fFermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope<\/a>\u202fhas spotted bursts of gamma rays \u2013 some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe \u2013 coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like\u202fneutron stars<\/a>\u202fand\u202fblack holes<\/a>.\u202fSo why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?<\/p>\n

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About a thousand times a day, thunderstorms fire off fleeting bursts of some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. These events, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, last less than a millisecond and produce gamma rays with tens of millions of times the energy of visible light.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Thunderstorms<\/a>\u202fform when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.<\/p>\n

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Updrafts and downdrafts within thunderstorms force rain, snow and ice to collide and acquire an electrical charge, which can cause lightning. Under just the right conditions, the fast-moving electrons can create a terrestrial gamma-ray flash.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged,\u202flike two ends of a battery<\/a>. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air \u2013 and zap! You get lightning.<\/p>\n

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This illustration shows electrons accelerating upwards from a thunderhead.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Scientists suspect that lightning\u202freconfigures the cloud\u2019s electrical field<\/a>. In some cases, this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful\u202fnatural particle accelerators<\/a>\u202fon Earth!<\/p>\n

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Interactions with matter can produce gamma rays and vice versa, as shown here in this illustration. High-energy electrons traveling close to the speed of light can be deflected by passing near an atom or molecule, producing a gamma ray. And a gamma ray passing through the electron shell of an atom transforms into two particles: an electron and a positron.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that\u2019s not all \u2013\u202fthunderstorms can also produce antimatter<\/a>! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron\u2019s antimatter opposite!<\/p>\n

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\"Animation<\/figure>
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NASA\u2019s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, illustrated here, scans the entire sky every three hours as it orbits Earth.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Fermi\u202fcan spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles (800 kilometers) of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.<\/p>\n

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Visualization of ten years of Fermi observations of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There are an estimated\u202f1,800 thunderstorms\u202foccurring on Earth at any given moment. Over its first 10 years in space, Fermi spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are\u202f1,000 of these flashes<\/a>\u202fevery day \u2013 we\u2019re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi\u2019s regular orbits, which don\u2019t cover the U.S. or Europe.<\/p>\n

The map above shows all the flashes Fermi saw between 2008 and 2018. (Notice there\u2019s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That\u2019s the\u202fSouth Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)<\/p>\n

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Storm clouds produce some of the highest-energy light naturally made on Earth: terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. The tropical disturbance that would later become Hurricane Julio in 2014 produced four flashes within 100 minutes, with a fifth the next day.<\/div>\n
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems<\/a>. In 2014 Tropical Storm Julio produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!<\/p>\n

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