What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. (Quanta, 5/6)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-lightning-the-answer-keeps-getting-more-interesting-20260506/

This really should be read in its entirety, but here are a couple of snippets to show why the findings about lightning are getting more interesting:

-snip-

Dwyer knew that a Russian physicist, Aleksandr Gurevich, had shown in 1992 that such a runaway electron could unleash a cascade of perhaps 100,000 electrons, akin to the avalanches that initiate sparks in the lab but playing out over hundreds to thousands of meters. And he also knew that when these relativistic, runaway electrons bounced off air molecules, they could emit gamma rays.

By themselves, these extreme subatomic affairs didn’t seem to be abundant enough to account for the brilliant gamma rays lighting up storm clouds. But then Dwyer imagined a baroque process that could allow one avalanche to set off another, and another, and another, all right on top of each other.

According to Dwyer’s process, when one electron in the avalanche collided with an atom, the electron could ricochet and emit a gamma ray. That gamma ray would transform into an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. The cloud’s electric field would push the positron backward close to where the avalanche began. There it could crash into another atom, setting off another avalanche, which would make more gamma rays, more positrons, more avalanches, and so on, until you got a flash visible from orbit.

-snip-

In the New Mexico desert, a pair of stations bristling with antennas captured radio waves coming out of a dozen separate lightning strikes. Using this data, Xuan-Min Shao, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was able to reconstruct the way the overall current moved during the start of these strikes. He found that something was off. If one of Dwyer’s cascades, or any other process driven purely by the electric field, was seeding the lightning bolt, the proto-bolt would move perfectly in line with the electric field from the very beginning of the process. But Shao found that in these cases, the two directions were slightly at odds. In the slant, Shao sees evidence for an extraterrestrial, even extragalactic origin for lightning — a cosmic-ray shower.

-snip-

And near the end, the article quotes Dwyer saying, "If this mechanism is true, every time you see a lightning flash, there is a physical connection to a dying star somewhere in the galaxy."