The Japanese Research Crowd Finding Platform Academist

1min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In their first campaign, the researchers installed 16 detectors in kanezawa and surrounding cities. They observed a series of telltale gamma ray signals, which could only be caused by nuclear reactions in thunderstorms. Their landmark finding proved that gamma rays could knock neutrons out of atoms in the air, making them radioactive. Now the team is expanding even further in an effort to spot more gama ray events and to better understand what causes them.

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.