Monday, January 17, 2011
Researchers Discover Antimatter in Thunderstorms
Dr. Michael Briggs, a member of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville today announced that the GBM telescope has detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth by energetic processes similar to those found in particle accelerators.
“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a university researcher whose team, located at UAHuntsville, includes scientists from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Max-Planck Institute in Garching, Germany, and from around the world. He presented the findings during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
Scientists think the antimatter particles are formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms that has a relationship to lighting that is not fully understood. As many as 500 TGFs may occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
The spacecraft, known as Fermi, is designed to observe gamma-ray sources in space, emitters of the highest energy form of light. Fermi’s GBM constantly monitors the entire celestial sky, with sensors observing in all directions, including some toward the Earth, thereby providing valuable insight into this strange phenomenon.
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