Muons reveal the whopping voltages inside a thunderstorm
Physicists used subatomic particles to probe the inner workings of a cloud
BY EMILY CONOVER 7:00AM, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
STORM SURGE Subatomic particles called muons can expose a thunderstorm (like this one) storing up a huge electric potential — more than a billion volts.
IAN FROOME/UNSPLASH
An invisible drizzle of subatomic particles has shown that thunderstorms may store up much higher electric voltages than we thought.
Using muons, heavier relatives of electrons that constantly rain down on Earth’s surface, scientists probed the insides of a storm in southern India in December 2014. The cloud’s electric potential — the amount of work necessary to move an electron from one part of the cloud to another — reached 1.3 billion volts, the researchers report in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters. That’s 10 times the largest voltage previously found by using balloons to make similar measurements.
High voltages within clouds spark lightning. But despite the fact that thunderstorms regularly rage over our heads, “we really don’t have a good handle on what’s going on inside them,” says physicist Joseph Dwyer of the University of New Hampshire in Durham who was not involved with the research.
Balloons and aircraft can monitor only part of a cloud at a time, making it difficult to get an accurate measurement of the whole thing. But muons zip right through, from top to bottom. “Muons that penetrate the thunderclouds are a perfect probe for measuring the electric potential,” says physicist Sunil Gupta of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/muons-reveal-voltages-inside-thunderstorm?tgt=nr
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