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Large Storms On Earth Are Particle Accelerators
MondoMor writes "Apparently, the atmosphere above Earth's strongest storms acts like a particle accelerator, according to a UC Santa Cruz paper. TGFs (Terrestrial Gamma ray Flashes) may occur as seldom as 50 times a day, 'but the rate could be up to 100 times higher if, as some models indicate, TGFs are emitted as narrowly focused beams that would only be detected when the satellite is directly in their path.' I'm glad the gamma-ray bursts are directed into space."
I am made out of subatomic particles.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Last time I was in a TGIF restaurant, I was exposed to all sorts of dangerous things...
Waiters
Loud Americans with cigars
and of course copious amounts of spilled beer.
Couldn't stand the weather
Can someone describe the physics that describe the creation of magnetic fields powerful enough to cause particle acceleration to some interesting end? Something just isn't adding up here. My guesstimates put the magnetic fields created by rotating charged particles at several orders of magnitute below any thing that can smash a baryon.
After all, I am strangely colored.
"The energies we see are as high as those of gamma rays emitted from black holes and neutron stars," Smith said.
The exact mechanism that accelerates the electron beams to produce TGFs is still uncertain, he said, but it probably involves the build-up of electric charge at the tops of thunder clouds due to lightning discharges, resulting in a powerful electric field between the cloudtops and the ionosphere, the outer layer of Earth's atmosphere.
"Regardless of the exact mechanism, there is some enormous particle accelerator in the upper atmosphere that is accelerating electrons to these very high energies, so they emit gamma rays when they hit the sparse atoms of the upper atmosphere," Smith said. "What's exciting is that we are now getting data good enough for the theorists to really test their models."
Cool, huh? It's like having a free, giant, massively powerful particle accelerator for use by scientists, but without having to build a massive building and dealing with constructions costs, red tape, and NIMBY issues.
"Jenkins! I want to test some data. Run it up the flagpole* and tell me the results."
* For sufficiently large flagpole, that is. Hey, combine this with the space elevator and you really got something!)
I'm curious... could these be related to 'Sprites' in any way?i teinfo.html
http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/AtmosElec/spr
This dates back to 'The Wizard of Oz' when Dorothy and Toto were accelerated over the rainbow by a large storm.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
The scientists forgot to mention what the lethal range of these particles is! How are they going to secure funding for next year?
"If the atmosphere was 200 meters closer to the ground, these particles would trigger a mass extinction."
These gamma ray bursts are also known as red sprites, blue jets, and super lightning.
http://images.google.com/images?q=red%20sprites
I'm glad the gamma-ray bursts are directed into space."
Why? If they weren't, we'd long ago have evolved some method of dealing with it. Either that or we wouldn't be here to worry about it.
They say they're getting 35 MeV electrons. This isn't enough to help out in modern high-energy particle experiments, but still could be useful. Maybe.
It would be interesting to see if these bursts act as a fingerprint of the planet that produces them. Perhaps they could be used to identify other planets with Earth-like atmospheres (or just planets in general...)?
that frood always talked about partical accelerators... just don't f'in cross the streams!
Ummm... We've had thunderstorms for billions of years, and presumably these gamma ray bursts as well. They are completely natural phenomena. If they could negatively affect us, we would have either evolved a method for coping millions of years ago, or we wouldn't even exist today.
OF COURSE the things are directed into space. Duh.
No way, if they shot down to earth, then we could ALL be the Hulk.
How would this affect carbon nanotubes?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Sounds scary really... lets hope no-one predicts a 'day after tomorrow' type event next :o
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
I'm glad the gamma-ray bursts are directed into space.
Although the outward going flashes (first detected by CGRO a decade ago) are much stronger, there are also lighting-generated X-rays seen on the ground.
I'm glad we don't live in the ocean. It's not that we'd drown... we'd have evolved flippers and a way to breathe or hold or breath for a long time.
Fire might be tricky, though.
Similarly, the gamma ray bursts would make having an electronic society very difficult.
Of course, we might find something even better from it... it might be a nice night time energy source, once we'd dealt with the shielding issue. Who knows? This is one of the things I like the way it is.
When is it going to stop? How many more flash floods do you guys need in Utah before you wake up?
Someone had to do it.
So ...
... The Dude
Could one of theses large storms be responsible for the mutation that caused humans to go from poop flingers to problem solvers?
At this point I get the evil thought of "if only they could be aimed at a terrestrial target..."
hmmmmm....
Ground a tesla coil to my old boss' office chair
OR
Fry him with radioactive lightning....
Option 2 just sounds like more fun.
Shame it can't be done... =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
The the Earth is not only a giant computer, but a particle accelarator as well? Pretty versatile planet really.
As am I, but I fear that these bursts of gamma rays are the real reason nobody's made first contact with us yet. It's kind of like when you go around town looking for a restaurant, you generally avoid the restaurants that bullets fly out of when you're pulling into the parking lot, opting instead for a restaurant where you can get at least to the hostess or maybe even your table before anyone shoots at you.
It's the same thing at work, here. Aliens do not want to share their warp drive technology with a planet that blasts them with gamma rays every time they fly by.
Gamma Rays from storms
* Weak anthropic principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_Principle
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I think it would be a bit safer to have the experiments performed by Dr. Clark Savage Jr.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Five points from Slytherin, for making a pointless joke about Muggles.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
All we need to do is construct detection systems capable of tracking and positioning themselvs over/around each particle accelerator and then telemeter the results back to some type of simple network. Then have some simple system that can reduce the observations from these many systems, forward that information to the interested scientists. Sounds free to me.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
.
.
Especially the accursed Reed Richards.
I wonder if blasts of gamma rays can be to blame for Cancer Clusters that have defied other explanations.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
AFAIK, no. The sprites/elfs/jets are usually studied by Elec Engs, and these things are poorly understood. At least, that's how it was ~6 years ago when I was doing minimal assistance for a Prof who was studying those phenomena.
1. expand TLA as needed.
2. craft dumb joke about the US
3. profit
If you read and post science articles here on Slashdot, I encourage you to visit SciScoop and help us grow the community there. We reported this very TGF story two days ago.
Yes, the acupuncture brain surgery seemed to work well. It made bad guys join the Salvation Army and play an accordion.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
...so I wouldn't know about Sprite.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
It sounds like an interesting phenomenon 35 MeV is higher gamma ray energies than I would have guessed. Maybe understanding the production mechanism can produce some insight about how some of the gamma rays from space are produced.
However, the energies for these are FAR FAR lower than the higher gammas from space. The highest cosmic rays are thought to be 20 TeV - 10^6 times higher energy than these. The highest man made particle beams are only 1 TeV (from the Tevatron at Fermilab www.fnal.gov).
Nobody has an explaination for how the highest energy cosmic rays are produced...
With the huge amounts of RF being pumped into the atmosphere from human activity, it's no wonder that there is a seemingly "natural" particle accelerator up there.
But it's surely a human caused RF assisted event.
"I'm glad the gamma-ray bursts are directed into space."
I'm not. If they were directed downward, creatures on earth would have evolved some defenses against irradiation and made space travel (and a lot of other things) a hell of a lot easier.
30 MeV is impressive for a terrestrial thunderstorm, but much faster and more energetic particles and photons arrive from space. One proton (dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle by the goofy physicists who observed it) was seen striking the upper atmosphere above Utah with a calculated energy of 320000000 TeV or 51 Joules, the energy of a 55 mph baseball.
First, about the energy: The energies of the particles (electrons) are only ~30 Mev. That's not much. Just for comparison, the Fermilab accelerator produces protons with 800 Gev (i.e., 800,000 Mev). Second, about the numbers of particles (i.e., the intensity): The article talks about 50 or so events per day. If that is 50 gamma rays, that's not very much. The Fermilab accelerator beam typically has a trillion protons in a pulse. So, it's interesting that one can get Mev energy photons at the top of thunderstorms out of elecrons being accelerated by electric fields but it isn't as big a deal on a technological scale as the article makes it seem.
Obviously you never wasted any time in a modern literature class that covered existentialist authors, did you now?
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I haven't been to france for about 5 years. I really miss the place, especially the restaurants where you, like you say, can just sit for hours and hours chatting and enjoying the early evening/late afternoon sun setting over the vines.
*sigh*
So offtopic, but come on, french restaurants in the countryside ARE the best.
I had David Smith last quarter for Mechanics! Good prof... The man has a thing for chickens, though... It's unhealthy... He came to class the day before finals in a chicken suit. He also drew himself in a loincloth in one of the problems on the final. To be fair, he was Tarzan. Hmm, maybe I'll go to his office hours and talk with him about this research...
I was thinking about the cosmic rays too. Perhaps in space, analogous processes (but in a larger scale, like a nebula or something) produces the rays. Just a sci-fi fan speculating here! ;)
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt ,best turn down the volts when its just the boss..."
"Oops another satelite
As long as we think these phenomena are natural Ming the Merciless will let us survive. Earthquakes Tsunami Wild Fire Hurricanes Gamma Bursts in the Atmosphere
Uh, yeah...
I leave near there. It's situated on a hill where you don't really have any reference points for what's uphill/downhill. The shack itself was carefully designed in the '20s to fool your sense of perspective. It's just like a hundred other roadside attractions in out-of-the-way places. Just some optical illusions.
BTW, I remember a few years ago when some girls I knew were visiting from out of town, and asked me if I knew where the Mystery Spot was... (of course, I told them that I most certainly did--at least, according to my ex-girlfriend anyways...)
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
{sigh} Spare me. So, it's okay to make rude remarks about "loud Americans" (see grandparent post) but all other nationalities are considered sacrosanct? Phooey. "Persecution complexes" aside, let me point out that we can be just as irritated by broad generalizations about our culture as you or anyone else. Furthermore, I am perfectly free to express irritation at such "foreign geeks" (although that's really an insult to the real geeks of any country ... a better phrase would be "inconsiderate jerks") whenever they feel the need to express their inner twit. Deal with it. And if that offends you ... change the channel.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.