Cosmic rays could reveal secrets of lightning on Earth

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Sabre
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Cosmic rays could reveal secrets of lightning on Earth

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Science Magazine


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Lightning is so poorly understood in part because measuring electric fields inside thunderstorms is challenging. Scientists have made measurements by sending balloons or small rockets into the clouds, but such probes can alter the electrical environment, potentially obscuring the natural activity they’re trying to measure. But such measurements fail to explain lightning's origin, as they have yet to find fields strong enough to initiate lightning. It could be that the high field regions are very localized, or it could mean another factor is necessary to set off the light show.

Cosmic rays could help researchers solve that puzzle. When cosmic rays smash into molecules in our atmosphere, the collisions create showers of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons, and other electrically charged particles. As these particles travel toward the ground, their trajectories are bent by Earth’s magnetic field, causing them to emit radio waves. Scientists watched those patterns of radio waves with the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands and compared their observations to a computer model simulating the radio wave patterns produced by cosmic ray showers. The model was able to reproduce most of the showers the researchers recorded, but things got wonky when the weather took a turn for the worse.

"Sometimes [the shower] looks strange, and the times when it looked strange coincide with times when there are thunderstorms present," says Pim Schellart, an astronomer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the first author of the new study. When a shower passed through a thunderstorm, Schellart and his colleagues found an atypical pattern of radio waves, due to strong electric fields in the storm that wrench charged particles around and change the radio waves' polarization, or the orientation of their electromagnetic wiggles.

By adding electric fields to their model, the scientists were able to calculate what kinds of fields had to be present in the skies above to reproduce the patterns they saw on the ground. For a shower that the scientists studied in detail, they found that the storm was composed of two layers: one between 3 and 8 kilometers above the ground, with an electric field of 50,000 volts per meter, and another, weaker field below that, which pushed particles in the opposite direction of the upper field. Although these results can't yet explain how lightning sparks, the measurement marks the first time a storm has been probed with cosmic rays—the first step in refining a technique that could improve scientists' understanding of storms, the team will report in an upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters.
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Pretty cool it if proves true!
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zaxrex
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Re: Cosmic rays could reveal secrets of lightning on Earth

Post by zaxrex »

I would say that the origins of lightning and the conditions needed to cause it are not fully understood.
What happens when the conditions are met, we know exactly what goes on.
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears
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