Every second over Spaceweather.com, almost 50 lightning flash in the zigzag over the sky of the earth. Despite the centuries of the study, the researchers are still not sure how the screws start. Electric fields in thunder clouds are often too weak to ignite a strong discharge.
A new study, which was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research with the title 3D radio frequency mapping and polarization observations, show that lightning flashes have been inflamed by cosmic showers.
“We believe that most of the flashes of lightning are inflamed in thunderstorms of cosmic ray shower,” says the main author of the study, Xuan-Min Shao, a senior scientist of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In order to examine the earliest moments of flash formation, Shao and colleagues built a radio interferometer called “Bimap-3D”. BIMAP-3D consists of a series of 8 antennas in Los Alamos and can create three-dimensional pictures of lightning and determine the screws in Thunderclouds. Here is an example:
Colors in the picture represent time. Blue traces the earliest moments of the bolt while red refers to the end.
This is a flash of a massive thunderstorm that drove from Los Alamos on July 30, 2022. BIMAP-3D in the image of more than 300 bolts during the 90-minute storm. It was a treasury.
The experimenters recognized that some of the screws they observed appeared in parts of the storm, in which the electrical fields were too weak to cause the “first breakdown event” (IBE) -the first spark that sets lightning in motion. Modern theories of the relativistic electron avalanche could not explain what they saw. Her suspicions soon concentrated on cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are particles with high energy that come from remote supernova explosions and other violent events in the entire cosmos. They constantly beat the atmosphere of the earth and create a secondary spray of particles called “Cosmic Radiation Showers”. Regular readers are familiar with these showers because we routinely monitor them with the earth to Sky Cosmic Ray Balloons via California.
One of the most important things on cosmic radiation showers is that they contain antimatter positrons and ordinary electrons. The 3D flash cards from Los Alamos contained strong evidence of positrons. Electrons and positrons are bent into opposite directions by the magnetic field of the earth, so that they leave opposite impressions on the flash polarization, which also measured BIMAP-3D.
“It took me a while to find out,” admits Shao. “I only started electrons at the beginning, but I could not explain the observations. Both electrons and positrons can consistently explain all observations.”
Positrons have won the case for cosmic rays. “The fact that a cosmic radiation shower offers an ionized path in the cloud that otherwise does not lack free electrons prefer the conclusion that most flashes are inflamed by cosmic rays,” the authors wrote.
In fact, it is still unclear how much flash of the earth is triggered by cosmic rays. Many other storms have to be examined with this method to improve the statistics. “This requires a lot of long -term and high -quality flash data,” says Shao.
Feature Photo: A flash over Brazil. Photo loan: Sergio Mazzi
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