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Thunderstorms Proven To Create Antimatter
radioweather writes "Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter from thunderstorms in the form of positrons hurled into space. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. '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 team. He presented the findings at a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle."
So, when can we place those beams on shark heads?
He'll want to know he was right...
--
http://www.twilightcampaign.net/
So this is exactly like the LHC, right? How can clouds be so irresponsible to create ANTIMATTER that will destroy the entire planet, just because they can! I saw what happened when Neo let a single drop of antimatter fall out of the Millennium Falcon to destroy the elves' homeworld. Why won't Obama do something about this "lightning"? He's in the pocket of the lightning rod industry!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Does this process potentially make the world more massive, in creating particle pairs - one of which escapes into space? Would this potentially be a way of testing gravity theories in controlled circumstances?
Ryan Fenton
You mean like 5 metres by 150mm by 100mm
I thought antimatter would only be created one or 2 antiprotons and positrons at a time.
Anti-matter is probably created all the time in the room you are sitting in. Just hard to detect.
With 1.21 gigawatts you can even go back to the future
I am wondering if there might be some way we can use lightning to launch spacecraft or other vehicles/matter into orbit?
Jamie want big boom!
Harvesting antimatter is incredibly hard. It's not like you can just stuff it in a shoe box. You need to make sure that it doesn't come into contact with any normal matter. This means putting it in a vacuum and using magnetic fields to make sure that it doesn't touch the sides of the container. Scientists only managed to make a stable antimatter container for the first time a few months back.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now when we're invaded by aliens, we'll just induce a couple of thunderstorms directly beneath their ships as they approach!
An lightning flash has an enery of about 500 Megajoule, which wil drive your electric car for 2000 km. No other fuel required, just put an iron rod on top and have a reload time of a few seconds...
"Does it mean it doesn't matter?"
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
This is most likely related to the phenomena known as Sprites, Jets or Elves, that have been captured coming from the tops of thunderclouds. Better explanations here http://www.sky-fire.tv/index.cgi/spritesbluejetselves.html
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
Maybe where you're living (US ?). But at CERN, scientists of the LEAR experiment have managed to produce, trap, and store antimatter as far back as 1995. And even to create anti-hydrogen atoms out of it.
What gave them the idea to look for these antimatter bursts? Did some scientist theorize it was possible and ask them to look? Or did the spacecraft start receiving bursts that they eventually tracked down to thunderstorms on earth?
The anti-hydrogen atoms were only stable in the particle-physicist sense - IIRC they lasted about 5 seconds. If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic, that really is a new achievement.
I am trolling
Keeping antimatter safe is easy; you can just stuff it in a shoe box, as long as the shoe box is made of antimatter.
"Lost time is not found again."
How do I know the event horizon is replusive?
Therefore anything which wasn't either in the car or physically attached to the outside car went couldn't go through and so there must be some minimum force needed to push through the horizon.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Rob-
Thanks for the BATSE plug.
For the past ~14 years (~1993 to 2007), I couldn't get anyone else, even on our own team, interested in TGFs, theory or obervations. It took the RHESSI observations, and the efforts of the fine scientists, David Smith and Joe Dwyer, along with the RHESSI observations, to invigorate the field. (Bob Malozzi and Berl Peterson were the only two persons who worked with me on TGFs in ~1999. Now its a big deal.
Jerry
Really? I seem to recall a few particle accelerators - LEP and Tevatron come to mind - that can (or could, in LEP's case) keep stable antimatter beams for hours. I'd agree that it's only antiprotons or antielectrons, but it's still antimatter, and stable for tens of hours. Also, you can make a death ray, instead of a silly bomb!
Are you telling me that we are that much closer to getting our warp drives???
nonsense, article states the rate of production is something like 500 events a year over the whole planet. You're not going to build a planet-wide harvesting system, and if you could 500 anti-protons do not a death ray make.
Charge up the anti-matter engine and prepare for an infusion of 1.21 Gigawatts! We're going BACK... ...to the future!
Which you then house in a larger antimatter shoe box and put it under your antimatter bed in your antimatter house.
YOUR shoe box. I have a bed made out of the stuff. Don't think that what goes for you applies to everyone, buddy.
Besides, I think everyone reading /. on any semi-regular basis already knows about the whole "capturing anti-matter" thing, so no need to repeat stuff like you're the only one who keeps up on the news.
You're assuming everyone has kept up on this news. It might be new to somebody, in which case this is incredibly helpful.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic, that really is a new achievement.
Considering that TSA won't even let you bring a shampoo bottle on a plane, I don't think they'll be allowing antimatter on!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
And as evident by the effect of a lot of wind blowing away from the event horizon as seen in the films when they do travel.
A non repuslive event horizon has the possibility of causing huge problems if the atmospheric pressure at the starting point was higher than the end point or vicea versa. 1-2 psi in planet size is a crapload of pressure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
*slow clap*
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
This is what happens when physicists get stoned during a thunder storm...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
And in English, this means?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Scientists only managed to make a stable antimatter container for the first time a few months back.
To clarify, they have been able to store charged antimatter particles using magnetic containment for quite some time. It is only recently that they have been able to store neutral antimatter particles, like complete hydrogen atoms.
I heard you can also put antimatter in a magnetic bottle, cuz no one really knows how magnets work.
Yes.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
What? No mention of Dr. Frankenstein's ground breaking experiments? The anti-matter is probably what made the monster kill.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
They'll be fine with it as long as it's stored in bottles that contain no more than 3oz and you keep them all in a clear plastic bag for easy inspection.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) on board the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory made many observations of TGFs from low-Earth orbit between 1991 and 2000. In fact, our second event after turning on the instrument was located to the Earth; very surprising, in view of the fact that we didn't expect *any*! The ironic part is that our main objects of study, gamma-ray bursts, were discovered by a series of satellites (Vela) that were monitoring the Earth (and the far side of the Moon) for gamma-rays indicating violations of the nuclear test ban treaty with the (then) Soviet Union. Seeing nothing from the Earth, the Los Alamos scientists looked for any other signal...
This line no sig
That he'll probably now be able to get a research grant to study this more closely after 14 years of trying to get people interested in what is, to him (and many of us on Slashdot), a fascinating phenomenon.
Well sure. But being able to carry around antimatter in a box (or rather a shipping container) would be nice, and I suspect very useful for physics (letting labs around the world get a supply for study from somewhere bigger).
I am trolling
Who has peer reviewed this claim? Who has tested it? This is Science by Press Release.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
the positrons are not escaping into space... TFA has it right
No, TFA says "When antimatter striking [the spacecraft named] Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays... The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft."
So, either TFA doesn't have it right, or the positrons are traveling all the way up to the altitude of the spacecraft. (I agree with you that that seems unlikely, given the mean free path in the atmosphere.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Well sure. But being able to carry around antimatter in a box (or rather a shipping container) would be nice, and I suspect very useful for physics (letting labs around the world get a supply for study from somewhere bigger).
And think of the surprise on the face of the TSA guy who opens it!
Harvesting antimatter is incredibly hard. ...
And you know this how?
I asked Barbie.
As much as I enjoy hangin' out with y'all here on /., I very much doubt that anti-matter specialists come here for the latest news on their specialty. Cern Courier, Physics Today, and Symmetry Magazine are fun reading, though perhaps some real physicists (I'm not one) can suggest better.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic, that really is a new achievement.
...yes, just across the Atlantic would be enough, but the container must not be too large for the airplane... like B-2, for example. Or we could use a rocket. If you have any information on the matter (or anti-matter), send me an e-mail: die_commie_die@mil.gov.us
Does this process potentially make the world more massive, in creating particle pairs - one of which escapes into space?
Nope. Makes the planet lighter by the amount of mass + (kinetic energy / csquared) that escaped.
That's because the energy that created them came from the Earth, where it had been for a while (even if it had previously come from sunlight rather than geothermal or combustion sources) and the energy itself - either as energy or as the difference of mass between two forms (before and after) of matter that liberated it - had mass itself.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I am. And boy does it bring a glow to my heart. :)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
If electrical discharges in a thunderstorm can concentrate energy enough to create gammas energetic enough to create electron-positron pairs (2 x 511 keV), I'd expect that (given the large concentrations of hydrogen in the cloud's water) they can also produce initiation energy for nontrivial amounts of nuclear fusion. (D D or D T at about 15 keV or P B at about 123 keV.) These reactions produce tens of MeV of output energy, some of which could appear as the gammas that produce electron-positron pairs.
It would be interesting to look for the signatures of that. Especially given that the mechanism of the dense plasma focus is a plasma instability that I'd expect to be sometimes produced in a free-air electrical discharge such as a lightning bolt or sprite.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The anti-hydrogen atoms were only stable in the particle-physicist sense - IIRC they lasted about 5 seconds. If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic,...
Why? Would be US interested in importing anti-hydrogen? What for? Create an Anti H-bomb?
... that really is a new achievement.
So a partial achivement in 1995 is not good enough?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Harvesting antimatter is incredibly hard. ...
And you know this how?
He's only got one hand, you insensitive clod!!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Bah! You wouldn't get 2.81794 femtometres.
Do these bursts have anything to do with the recently (past 10 years) documented phenomena of lightning that goes from the cloud tops out into space?
Harvesting antimatter is incredibly hard. It's not like you can just stuff it in a shoe box. You need to make sure that it doesn't come into contact with any normal matter. This means putting it in a vacuum and using magnetic fields to make sure that it doesn't touch the sides of the container. Scientists only managed to make a stable antimatter container for the first time a few months back.
They were able to contain anti-hydrogen for the first time a few months back. This is hard because anti-hydrogen has no net charge. On contrary, this group at my old school http://positrons.ucsd.edu/, has been trapping and storing (for long durations measured in days!) positron for many years.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
It's not about moving it between countries, it's about being able to make it in one big accelerator and then transport it to labs around the world. That would be very useful for science.
So a partial achivement in 1995 is not good enough?
Most new achievements are incremental improvements on previous ones.
I am trolling
"... the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams"
Does this mean that elementary school teachers may need to revise their assertions that lightning does not make noise?