When a shower passed through a thunderstorm, Schellart and his colleagues found an atypical pattern of radio waves, due to strong electric fields in the storm that wrench charged particles around and change the radio waves' polarization, or the orientation of their electromagnetic wiggles.īy adding electric fields to their model, the scientists were able to calculate what kinds of fields had to be present in the skies above to reproduce the patterns they saw on the ground. "Sometimes looks strange, and the times when it looked strange coincide with times when there are thunderstorms present," says Pim Schellart, an astronomer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the first author of the new study. The model was able to reproduce most of the showers the researchers recorded, but things got wonky when the weather took a turn for the worse. Scientists watched those patterns of radio waves with the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands and compared their observations to a computer model simulating the radio wave patterns produced by cosmic ray showers. As these particles travel toward the ground, their trajectories are bent by Earth's magnetic field, causing them to emit radio waves. When cosmic rays smash into molecules in our atmosphere, the collisions create showers of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons, and other electrically charged particles. It could be that the high field regions are very localized, or it could mean another factor is necessary to set off the light show.Ĭosmic rays could help researchers solve that puzzle. But such measurements fail to explain lightning's origin, as they have yet to find fields strong enough to initiate lightning. Scientists have made measurements by sending balloons or small rockets into the clouds, but such probes can alter the electrical environment, potentially obscuring the natural activity they're trying to measure. Lightning is so poorly understood in part because measuring electric fields inside thunderstorms is challenging. The advance could help researchers predict more precisely when and where lightning is most likely to strike and get people out of harm's way in time. By using cosmic rays, space-traveling particles that constantly rain down on our atmosphere, scientists report they can peek inside thunderstorms and measure their electric fields, helping them pinpoint the conditions that cause storms' electrical outbursts. Now, researchers have developed a new tool that could help them solve some of lightning's mysteries. Despite Benjamin Franklin's best efforts with a kite and a key, the phenomenon of lightning remains a scientific enigma.
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