Thunderstorms have been shown to create positrons and send them to space. As the late, great, Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show used to say, “That is some weird, wild, stuff“.
NASA’s Fermi Catches Thunderstorms Hurling Antimatter into Space
Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.
Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
| NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter launched by thunderstorms. Acting like enormous particle accelerators, the storms can emit gamma-ray flashes, called TGFs, and high-energy electrons and positrons. Scientists now think that most TGFs produce particle beams and antimatter. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center |
Fermi is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter striking Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays. The GBM has detected gamma rays with energies of 511,000 electron volts, a signal indicating an electron has met its antimatter counterpart, a positron.
Although Fermi’s GBM is designed to observe high-energy events in the universe, it’s also providing valuable insights into this strange phenomenon. The GBM constantly monitors the entire celestial sky above and the Earth below. The GBM team has identified 130 TGFs since Fermi’s launch in 2008.
“In orbit for less than three years, the Fermi mission has proven to be an amazing tool to probe the universe. Now we learn that it can discover mysteries much, much closer to home,” said Ilana Harrus, Fermi program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
| Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor detected 130 TGFs from August 2008 to the end of 2010. Thanks to instrument tweaks, the team has been able to improve the detection rate to several TGFs per week. Credit: NASA |
The spacecraft was located immediately above a thunderstorm for most of the observed TGFs, but in four cases, storms were far from Fermi. In addition, lightning-generated radio signals detected by a global monitoring network indicated the only lightning at the time was hundreds or more miles away. During one TGF, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 2,800 miles to the south. The distant storm was below Fermi’s horizon, so any gamma rays it produced could not have been detected.
“Even though Fermi couldn’t see the storm, the spacecraft nevertheless was magnetically connected to it,” said Joseph Dwyer at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. “The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft.”
The beam continued past Fermi, reached a location, known as a mirror point, where its motion was reversed, and then hit the spacecraft a second time just 23 milliseconds later. Each time, positrons in the beam collided with electrons in the spacecraft. The particles annihilated each other, emitting gamma rays detected by Fermi’s GBM.
On Dec. 14, 2009, while NASA’s Fermi flew over Egypt, the spacecraft intercepted a particle beam from a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) that occurred over its horizon. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor detected the signal of positrons annihilating on the spacecraft — not once, but twice. After passing Fermi, some of the particles reflected off of a magnetic “mirror” point and returned. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientists long have suspected TGFs arise from the strong electric fields near the tops of thunderstorms. Under the right conditions, they say, the field becomes strong enough that it drives an upward avalanche of electrons. Reaching speeds nearly as fast as light, the high-energy electrons give off gamma rays when they’re deflected by air molecules. Normally, these gamma rays are detected as a TGF.
But the cascading electrons produce so many gamma rays that they blast electrons and positrons clear out of the atmosphere. This happens when the gamma-ray energy transforms into a pair of particles: an electron and a positron. It’s these particles that reach Fermi’s orbit.
| A TGF produces gamma rays (magenta) as well as high-energy electrons (yellow) and positrons (green). This simulation tracks a TGF and its particle beams from their origin altitude of 9.3 miles (15 km) to 373 miles (600 km), beyond Fermi’s orbit. Credit: Joe Dwyer/Florida Inst. of Technology |
The detection of positrons shows many high-energy particles are being ejected from the atmosphere. In fact, scientists now think that all TGFs emit electron/positron beams. A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
“The Fermi results put us a step closer to understanding how TGFs work,” said Steven Cummer at Duke University. “We still have to figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process.”
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The GBM Instrument Operations Center is located at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. The team includes a collaboration of scientists from UAH, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and other institutions.
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See movies and images here
h/t WUWT reader James Barker
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Other fields of research are always more interesting. The closer you look the more strange things you will see. As they say technological innovation drives science more than the other way around.
This is why no one can really predict anything about what we don’t know.
Who would’ve thought in a million years thunderstorms produced antimatter?
And of course, all of this energy presumably comes from the collision of liquid and ice particles in clouds. When EU Theorists propose that the Sun can be powered externally, critics produce back-of-the-envelope electrostatic energy calculations meant to prove it cannot be (even though electrostatics are not especially useful in plasma physics).
But, when their failure to account for lightning’s power source is mentioned, it is a problem which never threatens the ideology that lightning comes from the collision of liquid and ice particles in clouds.
And nevermind lightning to space. From http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060322sprite.htm
“They realized that every time there was a sprite above the clouds there was a bolt of positive lightning below the clouds. The sprite and the positive bolt were parts of a single discharge that stretched from space to the Earth’s surface.”
And nevermind lightning on Venus …
“Perhaps the storms don’t generate the lightning but the lightning generates the storms. Venus, after all, has extensive lightning, more powerful lightning than on Earth, and it has an atmosphere of smog: Lightning in smog contradicts the thunderstorm theory of lightning generation. ”
And nevermind lightning bolts at the centers of dust devils, which have been filmed etching scribbles into the Martian surface.
The conventional view of lightning is an Earth-centric view of lightning that is bound to fail. These enigmas are not annoying obstacles to our efforts to prove our pre-existing views of the universe. They are critical clues which are begging us to re-examine cause and effect.
Does that mean that research on thunderstorms is credible but research on other aspects of weather is not credible? Or is it only research for which people don’t like to face up to findings that is not credible.
(How many people here know what anti-matter is? How many they think this finding might have an effect on the source of energy they use, or how hot or cold they get?)
Wow, wonder if it’s also part of those ‘sprites’ out of the top of thunder storms they’ve noticed a couple of years back. Very interesting.
How long before the eco-nuts start using this as the new ‘threat or bad consequences of global warming’. Given the level of fairly tales that they’ve come up with for their money swindle, er-CAGW altar, this should be interesting.
Matter and antimatter are created from energy ( γ → e− + e+) on a regular basis in nuclear decay. This blurb from Wikipedia describes the common phenomenon of “pair production” which is alluded to in the article above. Not all isotopes produce pairs, but many do.
“In nuclear physics, this occurs when a high-energy photon interacts in the vicinity of a nucleus. The energy of this (mass-less) photon has can be converted into mass through Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. Thus if the energy of the photon is high enough so that it can make the mass of an electron plus the mass of a positron (basically twice the mass of an electron which is 9.11 x 10 ^-31kg) then an electron-position pair may be created…..Photon-nucleus pair production can only occur if the photons have an energy exceeding twice the rest energy (mec2) of an electron (1.022 MeV)…”
In other words 511 keV x 2 as mentioned in the press release.
Can we seriously believe we can predict the climate in the year 2100 when we know so little. What hubris!
Isn’t this a reading of a proxy to another proxy? Out of that they assume the root source of the signal at Fermi is antimatter?
Why not the tooth fairy?
Whom says Science isn’t faith based?
Not said very loudly in this unclassified press release is that the gamma rays it is continuously monitoring (“waiting to detect” might be a better phrase) are “expected” to be coming from earth-bound nuclear weapon explosions.
Also, the satellite may be able to detect the atmospheric impacts of small comets and meteors by their radiation.
Anti matter in thunder storms…… Who woulda thunk it?
This electrickery stuff, sure is full of surprises.
Now that is science. I wonder what effect, if any, those TGFs have on the planet’s energy budget. If it’s never been suspected before August 2008, how well could it be accounted for in climate models?
Anthony,
Good posting! This is extraordinarily important news (and it makes a change that it is actual news from Nasa rather than various re-inventions of the wheel to keep their funding base).
The important thing I would say, rather than Terrestrial Gamma Flashes (TGFs), is more potential insight into the mechanisms of thunderstorms and tornadoes themselves which are frankly not well understood despite all the handwaving textbook explanations.
It might be worth mentioning, what needs to be a standard cautionary note: This phenomena (in this case TGFs) is nothing to do with CO2 although I daresay such ascribing is on the way.
Piers Corbyn astrophysicist, ARCS, FRAS, FRMetS;
MD WeatherAction.com long range weather & Climate forecasters
Very cool – is there enough to power a warp drive?
http://press.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/everyday/AM-everyday04.html
While I think of it – check out Star Trek at CERN by all means (heaps of fun) but press the home button for an additional antimatter explanation to that of Wikipedia. Again, heaps of fun.
Cheers
Robert
CO2 >AGW>TGF
So the next hype is : Galactic GR-Saturation! Because of (western) humans!
/sarc
/bad humor
Given the energy in lightning, I always suspected x-rays could be made. The idea is not new at all. It goes back a lot longer than most people realize.
“Lightning appears to be nature’s own particle accelerator after all. In the 1920s, Nobel prize-winner C. T. R. Wilson suggested that lightning could produce electrons traveling at the speed of light.” See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=x-rays-abound-when-lightn.
If you have relativistic electrons, antimatter isn’t much more of a leap. Very cool that NASA was able to demonstrate the process does occur.
“Thunderstorms Proven to Create Anti-matter”
That’s interesting, because thunderstorms are known to equally mysteriously produce lightning as well. And one of the explanations for lightning is that an electrostatic charge builds up between water droplets and ice crystals, although it is acknowledged that there is not nearly enough power to generate lightning electrostatically. And not only that, lightning discharges tend to happen very rapidly in succession – in other words, there is hardly time for the next charge to build up.
If an efield is building up in the cloudtops and accelerating electrons to relativistic speeds, and an efield is also building up between clouds and cloud-to-ground, this begs the question “Where is the electric current going to or coming from?”
“Effectively the discharges extend to space. And from there beyond to the magnetosphere, which then begs the question ‘Where is this electric current going to or coming from?’ and the answer is it’s coming from the solar circuit.”
“All planets have this connection to the solar circuit, which means that they are accepting electrical charge from the sun. It was imagined initially that these strange lightnings above storms were coming from the storm below. But the evidence is all in favor of the fact that the electrical energy is already sitting up there in the ionosphere waiting to get to earth. And it just comes down through those various elves, gnomes, the sprites – all of these whimsical names given to things that are not understood. Now once the charge gets to the thundercloud,
the electricity is distributed in the thundercloud, and then it is discharged to the ground through the normal lightning bolts. Or through tornadoes. Tornadoes are a slow electric vortex.”
~Wal Thornhill
interview
This sort of “real” science is a good illustration of why it is so important that we do NOTHING about CO2 or the boogie-man AGW at this time. I have no doubt that if AGW were in fact to be a problem, technology will be available for us to adapt or correct the problem by the time it really became a problem. Ever more reason to quit wasting valuable resources on AGW B.S. and futile CO2 mitigation/sequestration/CapN’Tax schemes, and instead, divert our attention to things like this, and fusion, and other such “viable” technologies.
AWESOME post Anthony! — Thanks Much!
Zeke the Sneak says: “…one of the explanations for lightning is that an electrostatic charge builds up between water droplets and ice crystals, although it is acknowledged that there is not nearly enough power to generate lightning electrostatically. And not only that, lightning discharges tend to happen very rapidly in succession – in other words, there is hardly time for the next charge to build up…”
I once saw a satellite video of a thunderstorm in Texas. It looked like drops falling into a puddle, except that each crater was a single lightning discharge. Moreover, there seemed to be connectivity–the discharges appeared related. I’ve looked for the video on the ‘net several times. It was definitely worth watching, but I never found it.
Energy in all forms is, quite literally, the stuff of life… right down to the micro-nano scale.
It creates, it destroys, it keeps it all going.
Not compound molecules (ie: CO2 *cough cough*)… just plain ol’ energy transfer.
Being on the ground underneath a 60,000 ft. anvil cloud is humbling. Love when it is dark as the hobbes of hell at 3:30p.m. on a hot prairie afternoon. This article is about the photo at the top of Anthony’s webpage, is it not?
Interesting stuff. The very high intensity shown in the map is not surprising in far Northern Australia since from August to Dec we get the Wet season from about the middle to the end of that period with ferocious thunderstorms.
The map shows most of the detected bursts over land, or plausibly over islands. Could the difference between over-land and over-ocean electric fields have an effect?
This is no big deal. I’ve created positrons many times in the past using only words. The trick is to take a negatron (laymen call them ‘electrons’) and give it some positive verbal feedback. Something like, “Don’t worry that they won’t let you into the nucleus. It’s because you’re better than them.” Or just simply say, “Negatron, you’re awesome.”
Their minds aren’t that complex, so it’s easy to give them a positive attitude. And charge.
😉
As previously reported here, the Crab Nebula is producing powerful gamma ray flares generated by “…super-charged electrons of up to 1015 electron volts, or 10 quadrillion electron volts, approximately 1,000 times more energetic than the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe…”
Now it’s revealed that earthly thunderstorms can produce streams of electrons that are so energetic they can also yield powerful gamma ray flashes, which themselves are strong enough to generate electron-positron pairs.
So what’s the point of building ever-more-powerful particle accelerators on Earth? What is there left to learn from smashing particles here on the ground? Wouldn’t a better use of research funds be to place advanced detectors in orbit, and see what such natural sources of high-energy particles and radiation end up doing?
Since the current “most important thing to discover with a particle accelerator” is the theorized Higgs boson, basically why CERN’s LHC was built, I Googled about it. Found this report. Fermilab’s Tevatron, the only competitor to the LHC in terms of power thus ability to discover a Higgs boson, will be shut down in 2011, there will be no extension as was hoped. Guess others are wondering about how useful these accelerators are too.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the freed-up funding will be diverted to a possible satellite project. Fermilab is run by the US Department of Energy, which will need all the funding it can beg, borrow, or steal to continue to combat Climate Change™ while leading the charge in reducing emissions of the deadly pollutant CO2 by helping us transition to Clean Green™ renewable energy sources.
Yup, good to know the DOE and this administration has their priorities straight. Science as it’s needed, and not a second earlier!