They are now expanding its work with the help of Japanese citizens. Wada and Enoto have big plans for their initiative, known as the Thundercloud Project. But by using a network of detectors, the small Japanese team has been one of the most successful in the world at spotting the phenomena - managing, on something of a shoestring budget, to detect ten TGFs and dozens of glows since 2015 1.
“These are some of the best researchers in the world in this field,” he says.Īround the globe, several ground-based groups are now looking at γ-rays from storms, including teams at large facilities designed to observe high-energy particles from outer space. The group, led at the RIKEN Hakubi lab by Enoto, an astrophysicist, is making rapid progress in understanding these high-energy phenomena, says Joseph Dwyer, an atmospheric physicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Because the clouds are so low, radiation emitted by the storm can reach the ground, rather than getting absorbed by the atmosphere. Located on the northwest side of Japan’s central Honshu island, the city regularly sees powerful thunderclouds that roll in from Siberia during winter and hover less than 1 kilometre above the ground. Kanazawa is one of the best places to capture both glows and flashes. Credit: The GROWTH collaboration/Thundercloud Project Researchers Yuuki Wada and Teruaki Enoto on top of Kanazawa Izumigaoka High School with their γ-ray detector. Studying TGFs from Earth has previously proved difficult, and scientists have observed the longer-lasting glows at only a few locations. Although satellites have spotted thousands of millisecond terrestrial γ-ray flashes (TGFs), those measurements can’t provide a close-enough view to reveal in detail the mechanism that produces them. There is even hope that the γ-rays might help atmospheric scientists to shed light on the centuries-old question of what initiates lightning.īut capturing these intense rays is not easy. Physicists want not only to understand this high-energy process, but also to use the radiation as a fresh lens for studying some fundamental questions about thunderstorms. That question has brought him to a rooftop in a growing storm. “The mystery is how this can occur in Earth’s atmosphere,” says Wada, a physicist with the Extreme Natural Phenomena RIKEN Hakubi Research Team in Saitama, Japan. Somehow, certain storms accelerate billions of electrons to close to the speed of light to produce these γ-rays. But in the 1980s and 1990s, physicists discovered that clouds on Earth also emit invisible γ-rays: as short, intense millisecond bursts and as weaker, long-lingering glows. They are often created by surges of electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. The device they are installing will spy on thunderstorms as they spit out γ-radiation - a mysterious process that physicists are eager to understand.Īs the highest-energy electromagnetic radiation in the Universe, γ-rays typically come from far away - from around black holes, supernovae and other extreme cosmic environments. This is exactly the kind of weather Wada and Enoto are hoping for. A nearby weathervane swings ominously and clouds gather over distant mountains, all signs of the storm brewing in the direction of the Sea of Japan. On top of Kanazawa Izumigaoka High School, the wind whips at researchers Teruaki Enoto and Yuuki Wada as they wrestle with a boxy instrument, trying to secure it to the roof.
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