Thunderstorms Churn Up A ‘Boiling Pot’ Of Gamma Rays

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

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.

I'm absolutely awestruck," says physicist David Smith, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the research. It's most important new data in this field for over a decade, he says.

Scientists knew of two main types of thunderstorm gamma-ray emissions. Short, intense blasts calledterrestrial gamma-ray flashesare 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, wereunexpectedly 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 Ostgaard and colleagues report in the Oct. 3Nature.

It's astonishing," says physicist Ningyu Liu of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who was not involved with the work.

What's more, the gamma-ray glows weren't static, as previously thought, but constantly simmered, brightening and dimming repeatedly on timescales of seconds. Large storms are bubbling. It's like a boiling pot," says Ostgaard, of the University of Bergen in Norway.

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