Scientists discover intense bursts of gamma rays from thunderclouds

By Dean Murray via SWNS

Scientists have discovered intense bursts of gamma rays from thunderclouds.

Using special aircraft to fly near the clouds, researchers believe the new insights into how lightning is produced will stop people being killed.

A new study reports that, along with visible light emissions, thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, that last for millionths of a second.

The clouds can also glow steadily with gamma rays for seconds to minutes at a time.

The international research team made their discovery while flying a battery of detectors aboard a NASA ER-2 research aircraft.

The discovery fills in a missing link in scientists’ understanding of thundercloud radiation and the mechanisms that produce lightning.

The insights, in turn, could lead to more accurate lightning risk estimates for people, aircraft, and spacecraft.

Co-principal investigator Martino Marisaldi said: "They’re almost impossible to detect from space. But when you are flying at 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) high, you're so close that you will see them."

The research team found more than 25 of these new flashes, each lasting between 50 to 200 milliseconds.

The abundance of fast bursts and the discovery of intermediate-duration flashes could be among the most important thundercloud discoveries in a decade or more, said University of New Hampshire physicist Joseph Dwyer, who was not involved in the research.

He said: "They’re telling us something about how thunderstorms work, which is really important because thunderstorms produce lightning that hurts and kills a lot of people."

For the study, in July 2023, the ER-2 airplane set out on a series of 10 flights from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The plane flew figure-eight flight patterns a few miles above tropical thunderclouds in the Caribbean and Central America, providing unprecedented views of cloud activity.

The findings were described in a pair of papers in Nature, published October 2.