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Rogue Antimatter Found in Thunderclouds
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13.05.2015
When Joseph Dwyer’s aeroplane took a wrong turn into a thundercloud, the mistake paid off: the atmospheric physicist flew not only through a frightening storm but also into an unexpected—and mysterious—haze of antimatter. Although powerful storms have been known to produce positrons—the antimatter versions of electrons—the antimatter observed by Dwyer and his team cannot be explained by any known processes. A key feature of antimatter is that when a particle of it makes contact with its ordinary-matter counterpart, both are instantly transformed into other particles in a process known as annihilation. This makes antimatter exceedingly rare. However, it has long been known that positrons are produced by the decay of radioactive atoms and by astrophysical phenomena, such as cosmic rays plunging into the atmosphere from outer space. In the past decade, research by Dwyer and others has shown that storms also produce positrons, as well as highly energetic photons, or γ-rays.
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