Thunderstorms caught making antimatter

Thunderstorms caught making antimatter

* Updated 16:44 12 January 2011 by David Shiga

Thunderstorms have been caught producing one of the most mysterious substances in the universe: antimatter. The discovery could further our understanding of the murky physics of lightning production.

NASA's Fermi spacecraft seems to have been hit by the antimatter counterpart to electrons – positrons – emanating from thunderstorms on Earth.

Thunderstorms emit gamma rays, known as terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs), although what causes them is still a mystery. While observing these flashes, Fermi also detected a separate set of gamma rays with an energy of 511 kiloelectronvolts. These rays were produced when a barrage of positrons struck the spacecraft's detectors and were annihilated by making contact with electrons there.

"These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, a member of the Fermi team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Antimatter source

Where does the antimatter come from? The Fermi scientists believe that gamma rays produced in thunderstorms may spawn positrons and electrons when they hit atoms in Earth's atmosphere.

Lightning and TGFs are both thought to be connected to strong electric fields in storm clouds, but the exact processes that trigger these phenomena are not well understood, nor is their relationship with each other.

"It's a little bit premature to say exactly what the implications of this [discovery] are going to be going forward, but I'm very confident that it's an important piece of the puzzle," says Steven Cummer of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work.

Briggs presented the discovery yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. The research will be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

When this article was first posted, the second sentence of the fifth paragraph read: "The Fermi scientists believe that TGFs produced in thunderstorms may convert atoms in Earth's atmosphere into positrons and electrons."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19943-thunderstorms-caught-making-antimatter.html

Now we know why the UFO's hide in thunder storms..

 

Antimatter is really interesting stuff and it is theorized that it could have many practical uses, such as a fuel for spacecraft or some medical applications. So studying it is worth wild in my opinion.

As to what you were saying about UFO's hiding in thunderstorms and there being a connection to that and antimatter, it does make sense. There is a lot of other strange phenomenon associated with thunderstorms, like thunderbird sightings, gremlins on planes, and a lot of other stuff I can't remember right now. Maybe the antimatter in the thunderstorms opens some sort of gateway to another dimension?

 

Dirac would have loved this. He would have to have followed that collective of positrons out of the atmosphere and into space to see where they might have been travelling to. I imagine he would play with the theory that like water, antimatter also gathers. And he would ask himself..where is the nearest collection of positrons? And he would murmur under his breath, "I want to bask in them".

 

I get the incredible urge to go outside during thunder storms ..
driving rain that prevents you from enjoying it, pisses me off though. but alot of times, we can stand on the porch and watch lightning..

 

Yeah man, that's the spirit..Franklin would be proud of you...if only we could harness that power.

I know, I know...there's no such thing as a free lunch!

 

There's so much they don't know about electricity. Its probably an even bigger mystery as to why it generates or channels consciousness the way it does in the brain.

 

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=417923&highlight=antimatter&f=38

 

if you were to touch the core of an exposed 66'000v high voltage line all matter would be vaporized within a 20ft diameter. "who am I to argue with science?" u would probably have atleast as much energy that a particle accelerator would generator.

 

er what I mean is there is no way a particle accelerator could generate as much energy as a lightning bolt....PEACE

 

wow this is seriously interesting stuff. I controls the weather... I controls the universe

 

Yes,when you have 500megajouls of energy being produced (about a trillion watts)in thirty millionths of a second air is heated three times the temperature of the sun causing a shock wave that breaks the sound barrier causing thunder. I'm sure there are quite a few particle collisions.