October 21, 2024
4 min read
Mysterious Gamma-Ray Flashes May Be Missing Link for Lightning Bolts
Observations from a retrofitted spy plane hint at a connection between powerful gamma-ray flashes and a thunderstorm’s lightning
Stuart Westmorland/Getty Images
It’s said that lightning never strikes the same place twice and a watched pot never boils.
But neither statement is true—especially when your “pot” is an enormous tropical lightning storm bristling with thunderbolts and you’re watching it from far above in the stratosphere. Two recent studies in Nature found that some storms are indeed at a rolling boil—one that emits powerful bursts of gamma rays, not steam. And some of these emissions occur in mysterious, previously unrecognized patterns, split-second flickers that seem to spark ordinary lightning discharges.
“How lightning gets started inside thunderstorms is a big mystery,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, who served as a reviewer for both studies. “Decades of balloon and aircraft measurements have failed to find electric fields inside storms large enough to make a spark, and yet thunderstorms manage to make more than eight million flashes per day around the planet. We are clearly missing something important. These new observations could be that ‘something.’”
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Scientists have long known that thunderstorms can produce gamma rays, extremely high-energy light that is more often associated with astrophysical phenomena, such as exploding stars and matter-devouring black holes. In earthly tempests, the physics behind such emissions is relatively well-understood: swirling, windblown water droplets and ice crystals build up an…
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