Anti-matter storms detected in Earth’s atmosphere
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope, which discovered mysterious Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes about a year ago, has discovered beams of anti-matter arcing through the Earth’s atmosphere. The anti-matter particles are created high above ordinary storm clouds by bolts of lightning.
Recent studies of lightning, using high-speed cameras, have revealed a whole world of activity in the upper atmosphere that nobody ever suspected. Phenomena such as Blue Jets, Elves and Sprites are all associated with lightning and dance in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms to altitudes as high as a hundred kilometers! In February last year the Fermi space telescope, built to observe GRB’s (Gamma-ray Bursts), surprised scientists by detecting tremendously powerful bursts of gamma radiation coming from our own atmosphere. Current research suggests a strong link between GRF’s and lightning bolts.
On December 14 2009, while Fermi was over Egypt, it detected gamma radiation from a thunderstorm some 4500km south in Zambia – far below the horizon, and therefore out of sight of any GRF’s. What’s more, the energy of the gamma radiation was precisely 510,000 electron volts, characteristic of an antimatter annihilation! Thunderclouds generate powerful electric fields, through a mechanism which is not yet fully understood, which discharge in bolts of lightning. Scientists had long theorised that a big enough thunderstorm could generate an electric field strong enough to drive an avalanche of electrons upwards through the upper atmosphere and into space. When these electrons collide with air molecules, the energy of the collision is released as a photon. The light from these photons is visible as the elusive Sprite. However, if the collisions are energetic enough, we get a photon with an energy of 510,000 electron volts, which can spontaneously transform into an electron and a positron (the anti-matter equivalent of electrons) as predicted by quantum mechanics. Normally the two particles would instantly annihilate each other producing another photon, but in this case the two particles are moving so fast that they’re deflected away from each other by the Earth’s magnetic field.
So we have a stream of antimatter positrons, directed northwards by the Earth’s magnetic field, colliding with Fermi. They strike individual electrons within the space telescope itself and annihilate, producing gamma radiation of the characteristic 510,000 electron volt energy, producing the signal which Fermi detected! And the most astonishing fact of all is that is is suspected that these Gamma-Ray Flashes are creating anti-matter in our atmosphere hundreds of times every day and have been doing so since the Earth first solidified!