Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth

bbc.co.uk

72 pointsmiraj11 comments

Have the scientists published how much antimatter is being produced?

With anti-matter being so exorbitantly expensive to produce, it might even be worthwhile to design a special purpose high-altitude plane with a magnetic scoop to harvest the antimatter!

The antimatter being produced is just positrons. They're fairly easy to make: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Production

Making and storing entire antimatter atoms is the difficult part.

Older article and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092081

That title makes it sound like the antimatter was on the run, avoiding the law or something.

Seriously though, I've always loved that there is a lot we still don't know about thunderstorms and lightening.

I did not think that from the title, but after what you've written, I can't help but picture the antimatter as illegal immigrants. I can see the typical reactionary newspaper story now: '"They took our joules!" One ground-based electron was quoted as saying.'

same reaction here. I think we're too accustomed to news about criminals...

this really is not anything so new

We've actually known about this for a while. I think BBC is covering the Fermi symposium this week so they are putting out some stories from it. (I work for the Fermi collab.)

Also from this same symposium: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13362958

Perhaps it's the other way around--electrons and positrons are produced by (some unknown means), they collide, and this is what causes the gamma ray flashes. Isn't that a possibility? I was surprised they didn't explore it in the article.

This is how we know that the initial gamma-ray flash is not caused by positron-electron recombination:

> The dance of light and matter continues when positrons encounter electrons again; they recombine and produce a flash of light of a precise and characteristic colour.

So the spectrum of the initial flash is different from the spectrum of the light produced when the particles recombine. Or so I assume from reading the article. :)

Right. Electron-positron annihilation produces gamma-rays in a line at a very specific energy (E = m_e c^2 = 511 keV), while the typical TGF spectrum is spread over a wide range of energies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com