In the 1990s, NASA’s satellites, designed to detect gamma rays from far-off space explosions, made a surprising discovery: gamma rays were coming from thunderstorms on Earth!
But how often this happened remained a mystery for years, since those satellites weren’t built to study our planet.
Recently, scientists got a chance to use a NASA U2 spy plane, originally from the Cold War era, to study thunderstorms more closely.
This aircraft, flying higher than regular planes and above most thunderstorms, allowed them to observe gamma radiation in a new way.
The results were astonishing—thunderstorms produce much more gamma radiation than anyone had expected!
Thunderstorms work like giant particle accelerators.
They create huge electric fields with positive charges at the top of the storm and negative charges at the bottom. This field can be as powerful as 100 million batteries stacked together.
When small particles, like electrons, get caught in this field, they speed up.
If they crash into other particles in the air, they create a chain reaction, leading to gamma rays, antimatter, and other radiation bursts.
But it doesn’t stop there. The scientists also found that some thunderstorms produce a constant, faint glow of gamma radiation.
However, this glow doesn’t always turn into big bursts of radiation, leaving more questions about what controls these changes.
To figure out just how common gamma radiation is in thunderstorms, the research team used the NASA ER-2 aircraft to fly over large storms.
They thought if these gamma ray flashes were rare, they wouldn’t see much. But the opposite happened—almost every storm they studied was full of gamma radiation!
The researchers were also surprised to find that thunderstorms in tropical regions are especially radioactive.
This is because tropical storms are much larger than those in other places, and the constant gamma glow they produce is like steam escaping from a boiling pot. This release might help the storm avoid building up too much energy.
Excitingly, the scientists discovered two new types of gamma ray bursts that had never been seen before. These bursts are much shorter than usual, lasting less than a second, and might even be related to how lightning begins.
But don’t worry—this gamma radiation isn’t dangerous unless you’re extremely close to the storm’s core, where no one would want to be due to the intense winds and turbulence.
So, while thunderstorms might be more mysterious and active than we thought, flying through the sky remains as safe as ever!
