
Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth - miraj
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12158718
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steve19
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!

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Lexarius
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.

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

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simonista
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.

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jordan0day
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.'

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juiceandjuice
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>

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jpeterson
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.

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jcarreiro
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. :)

~~~
gammarator
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.

