Dark lightning flings antimatter into space.

NASA's gamma-ray telescope FERMI has been detecting gamma ray bursts coming from thunderstorms on Earth. Now scientists believe they are caused by the "dark lightning", an invisible counterpart of lightning. The video below explains the mechanism, but in short it's this: thunder clouds send streams of electons upwards; electrons collide with air molecules and produce gamma rays; gamma rays are absorbed by the molecules and produce antiparticles, which annihilate and produce more gamma rays. All this is invisible to the human eye.



My blog: astromaks.blogspot.co.uk...

I hope to see some articles on this from NASA and other science sources. I wonder if this dark lightning is related to Sprites and other high-altitude electrical phenomena.

So...

Maybe one day man can harness the power of lightning and use the anti-particles to power a space ship?

"Engage the lighting drive!!" *heavy metal guitar riff*

Originally posted by MystikMushroom
So...

Maybe one day man can harness the power of lightning and use the anti-particles to power a space ship?

"Engage the lighting drive!!" *heavy metal guitar riff*

Then they will learn how to make it spin & pulse and call it a warp drive....

Originally posted by MystikMushroom
So...

Maybe one day man can harness the power of lightning and use the anti-particles to power a space ship?

"Engage the lighting drive!!" *heavy metal guitar riff*

The antiparticles being created by the lightning are positrons (anti-electrons) Me can already produce those, such as in a PET scan used by healthcare to look inside our bodies.

PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography, which images the insides of our bodies by capturing the annihilation of some electrons already in out body that come in contact with the antimatter (the positrons) -- antimatter positrons that were earlier swallowed by the patient in an antimatter cocktail.

Haven't watched the vid yet (at work) but very interesting. S&F

It would be cool to have some sort of satelite that can harness the antimatter and beam energy to the earth or something.