Scientists Find Thunderstorms Create Antimatter (VIDEO, PICTURES)

*Scroll down for video, pictures.*

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found evidence of thunderstorms on Earth shooting antimatter particles into space.

According to New Scientist, thunderstorms are known to shoot out terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs), which Fermi observed in several instances. Sometimes, gamma-rays interact with atoms in the atmosphere to form electrons and their antimatter opposite, positrons. Fermi was also able to detect these rare occurrences.

"While observing [TGFs]," writes New Scientist, "Fermi also detected a separate set of gamma rays with an energy of 511 kiloelectronvolts. These rays were produced when a barrage of positrons struck the spacecraft's detectors and were annihilated by making contact with electrons there."

"These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, who presented his team's findings on January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

"What seems to have happened is that positrons created by the lightning were herded into a tight beam by Earth's magnetic field," Briggs told his audience, according to National Geographic. "The beam funneled positrons from the Namibian storm to the Fermi spacecraft. [...] A few milliseconds after hitting the spacecraft, the beam struck a more northerly section of Earth's magnetic field [...] This caused some of the positrons to bounce back the way they had come, hitting the spacecraft with a second beam, like an echo."

PopSci reports that scientists now believe that all TGFs create beams of electrons and positrons, though not all thunderstorms produce TGFs.

"The Fermi results put us a step closer to understanding how TGFs work," said Duke University's Steven Cummer, who was not a member of Briggs's Fermi research team. "We still have to figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process."

Take a look at the video and photos (below) to see depictions of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes in action, as observed by Fermi, and visit the NASA Fermi mission page to learn more about this discovery. Then, take a look through our slideshow of NASA's most stunning images from 2010.

WATCH:

TERRESTRIAL GAMMA RAY FLASH:

ELECTRON SPRAY:

Comments

[GerryS]

11:07 PM on 01/16/2011

so that is what all the noise is---------------

[Equinator]

10:11 AM on 01/16/2011

Shocking! We should remain positive as opposed to negative as a (anti) matter of course.

[SeesBeyond]

04:34 PM on 01/16/2011

Well, positrons have positive charge, instead of the negative charge of ordinary electrons. Does that count?

[Rude Monk]

11:18 PM on 01/15/2011

So,like any good scientist-can they recreate this "antimatter" in a lab or is just a supposition?

[palindrom]

01:14 AM on 01/16/2011

Antimatter isn't as exotic as it sounds -- antiparticles are just like their normal equivalents, but with all their quantum numbers reversed. An electron, for example, has an antimatter twin called a positron, that has 1 positive charge instead of 1 negative charge. Antimatter was predicted back in the 1920s by P.A.M. Dirac, and then detected experimentally shortly thereafter. It's made all the time in accelerators, though in microscopic quantities.

One of the great unsolved problems in modern physics, by the way, is why the universe has a preponderance of matter over antimatter, despite the fact that they seem symmetrical in every way.

[SeesBeyond]

04:57 PM on 01/16/2011

Sure. Positrons are routinely created in particle beam experiments. Nature also creates them in certain types of radioactive decay, such as conversion of carbon-11 to boron-11, or from nitrogen-13 to carbon-13, by emission of a positron (referred to as beta-plus decay); these are used in positron emission tomography, for example.

What's going to be very difficult to do is to recreate in the laboratory the conditions that simulate what nature does to create positrons in lightning. It's possible to create small sparks with no problem, but they are not energetic enough to produce positrons. Creating an experiment that has enough physical size and high voltage to accelerate electrons up to the energies needed to create the high energy gamma-rays that are the agents producing positrons via pair production will be extremely difficult.

[Rude Monk]

10:44 PM on 01/15/2011

Anti matter,just like "space-time" is an abstract concept of the mind.
Now,if we can come up with the math to prove this,we can prove anything:)
Seriously,Huffpo give us a Science section already!

[arrgh]

02:20 PM on 01/15/2011

Now if I can just collect enough, I can power my time machine! Where's my kite...

[LMPE]

11:57 PM on 01/14/2011

I wonder if this was what caused John Boehner to turn orange

[undsoweiter]

08:43 PM on 01/14/2011

So my dog is an antimatter detector? Cool!

[Mekales]

10:28 PM on 01/14/2011

I have two Boxer dogs that can detect even hours in advance! I know what you mean!

[satanlite]

02:10 PM on 01/14/2011

That's nuthing. Everyone knows public restrooms create tea baggers.

[Indra]

12:32 PM on 01/14/2011

This can also be recreated in the laboratory.

[SeesBeyond]

02:57 PM on 01/15/2011

I don't think it has, nor is it even possible to reproduce this in the laboratory because of the nature of the processes involved. Got a link?

[kerriberri]

06:23 PM on 01/16/2011

May be mistaken, but didn't Tesla toy with this in his lab?

[theatheo]

10:06 PM on 01/13/2011

Sweet!....now what is anti-matter?

[i the ys]

10:19 PM on 01/13/2011

Nevermind, it doesn't matter.

[ebroadcast]

01:45 PM on 01/14/2011

{rimshot}

[Mr Anonymous]

09:59 PM on 01/13/2011

So, for all of those people who think CERN will be the cause of the end of the world; HA, in your face!

[Ekata]

09:32 PM on 01/13/2011

I know not much about physics,.. but does this suggest that perhaps gamma rays are composed of both matter and anti-matter, if you get one of each when it smacks an electron? or is the electron? both? or is something else happening?

Pardon this leap but, if it does, then it falls in line with a lot of 5,000 yr old Hindu and Taoist cosmology :)

[SeesBeyond]

10:27 PM on 01/13/2011

It isn't that gamma-rays are "composed" of both matter and antimatter, per se. What happens is that if a gamma-ray with an energy greater than twice the rest mass energy of an electron or positron (they both have the same rest mass energy) passes close to the nucleus of an atom, the energy of the gamma-ray goes into creating an electron and positron pair. The process is call pair production.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production

Not sure what this has to do with Hindu or Taoist cosmology, though.

[StephenJK]

07:39 AM on 01/17/2011

The philosophy of yin and yang.

[czs5056]

10:50 PM on 01/13/2011

gamma rays are waves of very high frequency energy with a very short wavelength. what i think happens is that when the gamma ray hits the electron it creates antimatter by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which basically states "in the absence of an observer all possible outcomes of events must occur simultaneously then when an observer observes then all except one of the wave functions collapse leaving only one outcome

[SYR]

08:45 PM on 01/13/2011

Ok, can anyone put this in 5th grade level terms? All I know is that I hate lightning and we have a lot of it in Florida.

[KriTiKiT]

08:33 PM on 01/13/2011

totally cool..........

[onionboy]

07:54 PM on 01/13/2011

Now, we're seeing anti-matter? When will the hate stop?

[Ekata]

09:28 PM on 01/13/2011

[applause]

[theatheo]

10:07 PM on 01/13/2011

(more applause)...i don't know how to make brackets