Beams of Antimatter Blast Into Space From Earthly Thunderstorms, NASA Finds
Antimatter Beams Now you know what they look like. John Fowler via Flickr/CC licensed Thunderstorms produce beams of antimatter particles that rain into space, NASA scientists said this week, shedding more light on one of the weirdest Earth physics stories of recent memory. Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, which are brief, powerful bursts produced inside thunderstorms, apparently produce high-speed streams of electrons and positrons that are swept up in Earth's magnetic field. Scientists are still not sure how TGFs work or how lightning enters the equation, however. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was designed to study high-energy physics in the distant universe by studying gamma radiation. But in 2009, scientists noticed a strange signal in their data - the telltale sign of decaying positrons, which are the antimatter mirror opposites of electrons, in the atmosphere. Fermi noticed 17 such gamma-ray flashes just before, during and immediately after lightning strikes in two separate storms, marking...