Inoto's Glows and Gamuray Flashes in Storms

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Team wants to use its detectors to understand the size of gama ray emitting regions and how they vary in time and space. One key player is the strong electric field. In thunder clouds, the field forms when rising streams of air carry ice crystals upwards past falling hail. Those fields are natural particle accelerators. If a very high energy electron enters the cloud's electric field, it can overcome the friction of air to accelerate to close to the speed of light. The link between gamma ray phenomena and lightning also remains murky. Physicists believe that some other process must also be at play.

Researchers in Japan are trying to understand why thunderstorms fire out bursts of powerful radiation.

Gamma rays – the highest-energy electromagnetic radiation in the universe – are typically created in extreme outer space environments like supernovae. But back in the 1980s and 1990s, physicists discovered a source of gamma rays much closer to home: thunderstorms here on Earth.

Now, researchers in Japan are enlisting an army of citizen scientists to help understand the mysterious process going on inside storm clouds that leads to them creating extreme bursts of radiation.

This is an audio version of our feature: Thunderstorms spew out gamma rays — these scientists want to know why

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