Thunderstorms churn up a 'boiling pot' of gamma rays [View all]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/thunderstorms-radiation-gamma-rays

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A view from a retrofitted spy plane soaring at 20 kilometers up revealed storms glowing and flickering in gamma rays, high-energy light invisible to the eye. Ten flights with the plane, NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, captured the shimmer of gamma-ray outbursts over a variety of timescales and intensities, suggesting that the emissions are more complex and more common than previously thought. And the study unveiled a brand-new type of gamma-ray blast the researchers named a flickering gamma-ray flash.

Scientists knew of two main types of thunderstorm gamma-ray emissions. Short, intense blasts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes are so luminous they can be seen from space, and last for mere fractions of a millisecond (SN: 1/10/23). Then there are longer, dimmer emissions called gamma-ray glows. Scientists spotted both on the flights.

Glows, the scientists found, were unexpectedly persistent and prevalent. They continued for hours, covered thousands of square kilometers, and were seen in nine of the plane’s 10 flights, physicist Nikolai Østgaard and colleagues report in the Oct. 3 Nature.
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