Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12158718

by miraj • 15 years ago

72 11 15 years ago

bbc.co.uk

simonista• 15 years ago

That title makes it sound like the antimatter was on the run, avoiding the law or something.

Seriously though, I've always loved that there is a lot we still don't know about thunderstorms and lightening.

appendix_a• 15 years ago

same reaction here. I think we're too accustomed to news about criminals...

ramynassar• 15 years ago

this really is not anything so new

jordan0day• 15 years ago

I did not think that from the title, but after what you've written, I can't help but picture the antimatter as illegal immigrants. I can see the typical reactionary newspaper story now: '"They took our joules!" One ground-based electron was quoted as saying.'

ubasu• 15 years ago

Older article and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092081

steve19• 15 years ago

Have the scientists published how much antimatter is being produced?

With anti-matter being so exorbitantly expensive to produce, it might even be worthwhile to design a special purpose high-altitude plane with a magnetic scoop to harvest the antimatter!

Lexarius• 15 years ago

The antimatter being produced is just positrons. They're fairly easy to make: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Production

Making and storing entire antimatter atoms is the difficult part.

jpeterson• 15 years ago

Perhaps it's the other way around--electrons and positrons are produced by (some unknown means), they collide, and this is what causes the gamma ray flashes. Isn't that a possibility? I was surprised they didn't explore it in the article.

jcarreiro• 15 years ago

This is how we know that the initial gamma-ray flash is not caused by positron-electron recombination:

> The dance of light and matter continues when positrons encounter electrons again; they recombine and produce a flash of light of a precise and characteristic colour.

So the spectrum of the initial flash is different from the spectrum of the light produced when the particles recombine. Or so I assume from reading the article. :)

gammarator• 15 years ago

Right. Electron-positron annihilation produces gamma-rays in a line at a very specific energy (E = m_e c^2 = 511 keV), while the typical TGF spectrum is spread over a wide range of energies.

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

We've actually known about this for a while. I think BBC is covering the Fermi symposium this week so they are putting out some stories from it. (I work for the Fermi collab.)

Also from this same symposium: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13362958

Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth

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