NASA’s Fermi catches thunderstorms hurling antimatter into space

This pdf illustrates how thunderstorms launch particle beams into space. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Dwyer, Florida Inst. of Technology

Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have caught thunderstorms producing one of the most mysterious substances in the universe: antimatter. The discovery could further our understanding of the murky physics of lightning production.

Thunderstorms emit gamma rays, known as terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs), although what causes them is still a mystery. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a TGF, also shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

While observing these flashes, Fermi also detected a separate set of gamma rays with an energy of 511 kiloelectronvolts. These rays were produced when a barrage of positrons struck the spacecraft’s detectors and were annihilated by making contact with electrons there.

“It’s a little bit premature to say exactly what the implications of this [discovery] are going to be going forward, but I’m very confident that it’s an important piece of the puzzle,” says Steven Cummer of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not part of the study. “The idea that any planet has thunderstorms that not only produce antimatter but then launch it into space seems like something straight out of science fiction,” commented Cummer. “That our own planet does this, and has probably done it for hundreds of millions of years, and that we’ve only just learned it, is amazing to me.”

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

Briggs presented the discovery yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. The research will be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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