Scientists Just Caught Lightning Firing Off a Gamma-Ray Blast

For the first time, scientists have caught lightning in the act of unleashing a powerful burst of gamma radiation known as a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF). Researchers at the University of Osaka led the work—an intimate look at one of the most powerful and mesmerizing natural phenomena on our planet. The work also marks a step forward in the quest to understand how thunderstorms manage to pump out radiation we generally associate with the universe’s most extreme objects: black holes and neutron stars. The team’s study describing the observation was published today in Science Advances. Using a cutting-edge multi-sensor system in Kanazawa City, Japan, the team observed a lightning discharge split between two paths—one descending from a thundercloud, the other arcing up from a ground-based transmission tower. The scientists found that a gamma flash occurred just 31 microseconds before the two discharges met in the air. “Most TGFs have been detected by satellites, but spaceborne obs ... Read full article.