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"Dark Lightning" Could Expose Airline Passengers To Radiation
mbstone writes "Lightning researcher Joseph Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology claims that thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays which could cause airline passengers to receive in an instant the maximum safe lifetime dose of ionizing radiation — the kind that wreaks the most havoc on the human body. Dwyer hopes his sensor aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, will provide more data."
I smell a boost in tinfoil hat sales skyrocketing ....
That's almost as bad as old television!
It's an interesting claim and I look forward to hearing more about it but there is effectively no risk to people flying being suggested. Unfortunately /. has decided to focus on the non-existent risk rather than the rather interesting properties of 'dark lightning' and what study of it could help us to understand.
Should be really easy to study - are aircrew more likely to suffer the ill effects of ionizing radiation, whatever those are.
It would be the sort of thing that an established Airline and staff (or air force) would probably already have noticed, particularly any that fly through and around the intense storms in the tropics. The fact that they haven't leads me to think that this may be a non-story.
It being common knowledge that flying is subject to higher than normal radiation levels, and there is therefore a worry about crews, I had assumed that aircraft carried dosimeters so that crew members' total personal doses were monitored. No? If so, then this would not be a theory - it could be checked from the monitoring.
If they do not carry dosimeters, why not? Ground level radiation workers have to by law. I am a nuclear engineer and do so on visits to plant - yet my total life dose over some years of this is tiny, less than typical aircrew would have I believe.
Don't most planes fly above the storms?
...and no commercial passenger airplane can fly that high, only some very special aircraft (hint: some spy planes... by now replaced by cheaper satellites, though).
Not if you've been spayed. My condolences to your reproductive capabilities ;)
The article basically says no one has probably ever been hit. The incidence of dark lightening is about 1/1000th the incidence of visible lightening and pilots avoid thunderstorms.
FTFY
You crazy Americans insist on misspelling everything
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
People have been flying for many decades. Epidemiologically, there is a significant increase among airline pilots only of melanoma and breast cancer, not of other cancer types. That's not consistent with occasional large bursts of x-ray and gamma radiation (it may be due to leisure activities).
As usual I wikipedia something like "dark lightning" that i've never heard of before. Nothing found, but wikipedia search is pretty crap.
Anyway the best I could find was Relativistic-runaway-electron avalanche
Airlines should be subject to the same regulations as nuclear power. All planes should have a few meters of lean and concrete shielding to protect the passengers. Anything that saves one childs life should be done.
Pilots (I am one) live longer because of the strict medical requirements imposed upon them, and the fact that the moment a pilot shows any sign of sickness, especially with respect to the most common health problems in the US (Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Hypertension), they are grounded and do not get included in the long-term studies of pilot lifespan.
The studies of pilot lifetime have the unfortunate bias of the FAA weeding the unhealthy from the sample group long before the "bad" samples can be included in the statistics.
Now, instead of those flimsy blankets on long flights, I'll have to wear the lead aprons you get when the dentist is x-raying your teeth. And probably pay extra for the weight increase, too.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/557340.stm
Radiation damage isn't cumulative. If it were, you would see greater incidences of cancer in areas with higher naturally occurring background radiation, or in workers with greater exposure. Unless you overwhelm your body's repair mechanisms, the damage is essentially harmless and repair is a natural part of everyday life. Low levels of radiation are much less dangerous than ordinary carcinogens and particulate that we are dumping into our environment by the billions of tons every year.
Granted, this so-called dark lightning may exceed safe levels over short periods of time. Then again, if you are struck by lightning, you will also probably exceed a maximum safe number of electrons transiting through your body. This would appear to be an extremely rare, if not entirely imaginary problem. To my knowledge, there have't been any planefuls of people who have died of acute radiation exposure.
Do the use of "Composite" aircraft (i.e. Dreamliner) skins make this worse - as there is less of a Faraday cage around people?
(Taking the opportunity that there's a physicist around)
And what about the numbers of photon? (Sorry, not the correct term, but I think you see what you mean. I'm an MD and currently too lazy to dig the correct terminology).
I mean, yes X-Rays can be highly energetic and Gamma even more so. But I'm under the impression that the higher the energy, the lesser the amount of produced rays.
Ultimately, we might find real proof that indeed very high energetic Gamma rays might be produced occasionally, but practically it's only 1 single ray which might be produced by chance very infrequently. So in practice there isn't much danger because one single ray will never do enough significant damage.
Gamma Ray can break atomic bonds. But if only a single bonds get broken in the body, it won't even be noticed, it will be lost among all the other random events that the body copes with on an everyday basis.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Of course they'd need radiation shielding. Something like lead?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then don't get those flight attendants angry. You wouldn't like them when they're angry.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Dwyer hopes his sensor aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, will provide more data."
The "sensor" referred to in the article appears to be the main instrument on board the Fermi spacecraft: the not very imaginatively named Large Area Telescope,
or LAT. This was developed by a very large international team, including NASA and the DoE in the US. However, Dwyer, as far as I know, was not
a member of this large team. (And I don't think the article or Dwyer actually claim this.)
The data obtained from the LAT are made public as soon as possible, usually within much less than 24 hours,
after being obtained. Anyone in the world is free to download and analyze these data.
http://www-glast.stanford.edu/
http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/
The Fermi satellite also carries the GBM - gamma-ray burst monitor, which has provided the majority of the results on gamma-rays
from lightning. The data from this instrument are also immediately public.
http://gammaray.msfc.nasa.gov/gbm/
However, because there’s only about one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes and because pilots take great pains to avoid thunderstorms, Dwyer says, the risk of injury is quite limited. No one knows for sure if anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.
X-Ray and, esp, gamma ray cannot travel too for through air....
Come on little gamma ray
Standin' in a hurricane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z25_T_wkAV4
Dark Lightning sounds like a great superhero name. His nemesis would be Heavy Early.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They have tethers. They can be led.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Weather_conditions The special on TV said the storm was too tall to fly over, too big to fly around. Might have been too late to turn back, I forget. Anyway, the Pitot tube heaters were too weak to stay defrosted.
This chart will go bananas if we try to add that dark lightnings into the equation.
Dark matter, dark energy, dark lightning; whenever somebody has a fuzzy theory lacking direct evidence, they call it Dark X. Is somebody hiring Batman to write their science papers or something?
Table-ized A.I.
Lightning is not a big problem except for those radiation bursts. The real reason you stay away is that lightning comes with storms that come with turbulence so bad it may use up all of the fatigue life of the airframe in one flight, you can get into hail that will make the airplane a total loss if you're lucky to come out alive, and there may be strong down-moving columns of air that can get you on the ground in no time if you're low enough. A lighter GA plane has much flakier skin and is much more likely to get destroyed mid-air by hail and turbulence.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So why doesn't mine get fogged when I fly with it*?
*Back in the old days, before TSA would have a shit-fit if you ask them to hand check the film. I fear the baggage scanners fogging film far more than whatever is happening at 40,000 feet. And not just me, but what about the poor sod who has to stand in front of the thing for eight hours. Right at testicle/ovary level.
Have gnu, will travel.
If pilots/aircrew were dropping dead from illnesses, I'd have an easier time believing anything related to this article.
Aircrew & Radiation
With all of the airline news coming out lately, we get it.
We're supposed to stop flying. We'll get right on that and have a solution in a week, don't you worry!
Airplanes routinely try to avoid thunderstorms because of the danger of wind shear. At most this danger might lead to increasing the preferred distance; but it seems unlikely that there much added risk vs. proximity to a lightning strike while on the ground.
"Oh, the scientific illiteracy found on mock technical sites like Slashdot."
Slashdot doesn't publish articles. They aggregate/filter news and provide summaries. The summaries are often inaccurate or sensationalized. It has nothing to do with the article itself. Slashdot doesn't right the article, just the summary and provides a link. Trying to discredit slashdot's summary says nothing about the article itself.
"There is a lightning strike so electrically violent, the movement of electrons forces gamma rays into existence. And yet, if this bolt hit me, my body wouldn't notice the fact."
The electricity from the lightning doesn't strike you directly. It couldn't, given that you are inside the shell of the aircraft. If you'd RTFA with an ounce of reading comprehension, you'd see it is about being in the vicinity of the strike such that you are exposed to the gamma radiation.
You are trying so hard to twist the words to fit your conspiracy theories.
"Clearly Dwyer doesn't understand the difference between electrons and photons, or electricity and the electro-magnetic spectrum. But I promise you, Dwyer supports Obama's holocaust in Syria, and Obama's policies and beliefs connected with 'global warming'."
Between those two sentences, you made the logical leap of associating ham with a hamster. Dwyer isn't an alarmist: article states that dark lightning might be such a rare occurrence that it's difficult to say if anyone has been exposed to it. We were talking about lightning, and you are talking a war in Syria.
So, beside the fact that an airplane is a flying coffin, weather permitting you also get the benefit of a little radiation exposure? sounds.. tingly.
Radiation damage isn't cumulative.
What? Not cumulative? Of course it is! See for example this link, which you don't even have to read, just look at the headline:
http://hsionline.com/2012/05/29/undoing-the-damage/
All new planes should be built from inch thick lead. Maybe thicker, haven't done the math. ;p
if so. i could be being hulk with just fly between thunderstorm.
The "maximum lifetime dose" bit is already disproven. The "maximum lifetime dose" isn't a single number, the NRC defines it differently for different ages and populations, but it's typically well above 10rem, often above 20. But 5rem is enough to completely blacken ASA 100 film. Back in the days of vacationers with film cameras, every airplane flight was a test for the "maximum lifetime dose from lightening" hypothesis. Anybody ever hear of an entire planeload of angry people who'd lost their vacation snapshots? No? Well, there you go.
And what about the numbers of photon?
That's luminosity. {...} color of light is energy (voltage), while luminosity gives you current but never voltage.
Thank you, that's the term I was looking for. As said, IANAP.
To put it another way, in an X-ray machine (or any other process that uses electric field to accelerate things to produce photons in resulting collisions), energy of photons is due to voltage. Number of photons (luminosity) is due to current.
Uh oh, then I've problably wrongly understood thunderstorm.
From what I've understood, in an X-Ray machine, the X-Ray are produced by breaking: when the flux of accelerated electrons hit the metal, the decelerate (obviously), and they dump the lost kinetic energy as light, producing X-Rays (whose exact wave length depends on the speed of the electron. That's why the X-Ray are often specified not by wavelenght, but by the acceleration energy used to produce them). The X-Ray produced this way tend to be mono-chromatic (not sure if correct term).
Whereas, in a thunder - I though - the electro-magnetic emission comes from the electron excitation: the high tension (voltage difference) kicks the electron to higher energy states or even tears them away from their atom's orbital (making the air plasma and thus conductive). Light is emitted when electron settle back and return to lower energy states. Plasma emits thus a lot of spikes at different point of the spectra (depending on the different 'pathway' (not sure what the official term is) possible between the various excitation states), plus a continous base spectrum produced by the thermal radiation/glow as the air plasma heats from the electric current flowing accross it. In this case, all the emited electromagnetic radiation will be spread over a wide band (with some spike specific to the composition of air). The exact wave lenght composition emitted will be more or less random (specially for the thermal part). But the total energy should be conserved: the overall the emitted electromagnetic energy - colour/wavelenght and luminosity/number of photon - depending on the electrica energy - tension/voltage and current/amps.
With higher energy photo being rarer.
My main argument for the two distinct mode of radiation being that the solid metal (in deceleration) is dense and collision dominate, whereas thunder happens in the air - a gazeous milieu (thus less collision) which is non-conductive at rest (thus requiring ionisation to conduct the thunder - hence the electon-kicking).
Again, I am not a physicist. I have background in medicine/biology/bioinformatics.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]