The Future of Particle Accelerators

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Researchers in Japan have found that glows can be triggered by lightning. The flashes appear at the tart of lightning strikes and are possibly triggered by them, whereas glows can start minutes before lightning happens. What triggers lightning is one of the biggest mysteries in atmospheric science. There's still so much we don't know about how it forms and how it develops.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.