How About...Antimatter Thunderstorms

How come there is an enormous ring trying to make antimatter...and we end up finding it at Thunderstorms?

Albert Einstein

Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope has detected Antimatter during thunderstorms...

Yes you read correctly, Antimatter is produced during thunderstorms.

Do you remember the previous article I wrote about the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope? I mentioned how this telescope was used to observe the galaxy, and amazing images were taken. Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope found that our Galaxy had two Bubble-like protuberances that were made of Gamma Rays.

Well, now Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope found out something far more interesting: Antimatter.

Since Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope is orbiting Earth, he can take every now and then a look at the Earth, so what Fermi (let´s call it this way for more efficiency) saw was simply astonishing: 

Basically, during a thunderstorm, Fermi captured Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flash or TGFs released towards space. So what?  The strange thing right here was that while Fermi was taking a look at a storm, some highly energetic particles collided with the moon. But Fermi detected that those particles were instantly annihilated instants after its collision...any idea? There could only be one possible answer: Antimatter.

But What's Antimatter?

We'll have to go back to 1905, when Einstein was unveiling his Special Relativity Theory. Theory in which he spoke about space and time, relationship between matter and energy and of course his famous equation E=mc² 

Max Planck

He even mentioned about light's behaviour, saying that sometimes she behaved like a wave, and others like tiny particles. Those tiny particles, Max Planck called them quanta. (latin word for how much)

Erwin Schrödinger

Later in time, by 1920 Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg came up with the Quantum Theory, in which they were able to describe this quanta, or tiny particles. 

But something was not working correctly...Schrödinger's and Heisenberg's theory did not "work" at high relativistic velocities.  At least not until 1928 when Nobel Prize winner (1933) Paul Dirac formulated an equation in which he could describe the electrons' behaviour combined with quantum theory and special relativity.

Werner Heisenberg

Yes...here comes another But...

But something was not working right for Dirac's equation...his equation could have two answers. That meant that an electron (which we all know is negatively charged) could either be negative or positive. 

Paul Dirac

What?

Dirac concluded that therefore, for every negative-electron, there was one positive-electron. He called this, an anti-particle.

Four years later (1932) Carl Anderson was studying cosmic rays, aided with a cloud chamber (closed chamber with a gas near condensation, where ionized particles' trajectories are seen by droplets) found something intriguing: he saw a track from a positively charged particle with exactly the same mass of an Electron. He called this Positron,  for "posi(tive elec)tron" he won Nobel Prize 1936.

Carl Anderson

He was able to prove that Dirac was right, for every particle in space, there was an equal amount of antiparticles. Commonly known as Antimatter.

So that is exactly what Fermi (telescope) captured during a thunderstorm. Scientists believe that this is the result from a GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) originated at the thunderstorm, when electrons are released towards space (at nearly the speed of light [300,000 km/sec] )and hit an atom.

Once the gamma ray produced hits another atom, it "splits" it into two particles: an electron and guess what else...a positron.

Now take a look at this marvelous animation by NASA, so that you can have an idea of how it works.

Pretty Amazing isn't it? who would ever have thought that we were going to find out Antimatter produced by thunderstorms, at Earth!?




Thanks for reading.

Schrödinger's Cat

 We'll later know more about Schrödinger's Cat.

I.