It is rare for ‘black lightning’ to briefly touch flying passengers

CHICAGO — More than electricity can illuminate a cloud.

Bright bursts of gamma rays, known as dark lightning or terrestrial gamma rays, also occur during lightning storms. But on rare occasions, those powerful winds — the most intense radiation that occurs naturally on Earth — could even hit a passing airplane, researchers reported Dec. 13 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The zap was able to briefly expose passengers to safe levels of radiation

First reported in 1994, dark lightning is estimated to flash a million times around the world each day. But he has no knowledge but a dim understanding of how to begin. They generally agree that dark lightning is excited by electric fields generated by lightning and lightning. These fields can propel electrons to speeds approaching the speed of light, breaking up electron avalanches. When the converging particles break into air atoms, gamma radiation is released.

Dark lightning often occurs about 10 to 15 kilometers high in the sky, heights frequented by airlines. The new dark analysis combines observations of lightning and airline flights to suggest that dark lightning strikes near the plane about once every 1 to 4 years, atmospheric scientist Mélody Pallu said at the meeting. It is probably true that “the upper bound of the true probability” or even 10 times itself, he said, mainly because the system did not make thunder in the flight of the pilots.

Previous computer simulations have shown that passengers within 200 meters of a strong terrestrial gamma-ray flash initiation point could be exposed to radiation doses exceeding 0.3 sieverts, said Pallu, now at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. Such levels would exceed the occupational safety level of 0.02 sheaves per year proposed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

though somewhat nebulous, the findings make one thing clear: further research is needed to figure out how the dark lightning strikes flying through the sky.