Thunderstorms Make Antimatter!!!

Holy Carp!!

Could this perhaps lead to a new Tier 9 power for Storm Summoning?

If it can help us harness antimatter and develop new energy sources then it's all good.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Green energy if its actually there and we can collect it... and new weapons too... we can nuke people with no fall out if we can harness it wooo.

The end of the article says the scientists still have to "figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process".

Well that part is obvious: clearly the extra-dimensional alien invaders are using thunderstorms as antimatter particle beam weapon platforms to attack us. They are like big fluffy tanks floating around the world slowly zapping us back to the stone age.

Hmmm...I just though of an adventure hook for the PnP Supers game I'm running right now. Dr. Stratosphere has managed to harness the antimatter-generating power of thunderstorms, and is flying around in his unassailable cloud fortress threatening to destroy major cities unless he is paid 1 BILLION dollars! Muahahahaaa!!

Can the heroes stop this madman before Peoria is wiped off the face of the Earth?

Just when I thought thunderstorms couldn't become more awesome, we find out that they're spewing anti-matter. Nice.

Of course, people still don't trust nuclear power. There's no way they'll trust anti-matter, since even a single anti-proton will start a chain reaction that will destroy the whole of the earth!

Yes, I'm being factitious.

Basically, what I'm saying is, if a power source is ever developed, expect it to never be developed properally because of the lunatic fringe.

Yeah, did you see the plans for "clean" Nuclear Power plants in a TED video...basically we have the ability to Use a nuclear reactor and burn through our nuclear power, then take the "Waste" and use it in a tier 2 reactor... then take that waste and use it in a tier 3 reactor and so on, but instead of getting this thing set up and fixing up our power grids... we can't because nuclear is too dangerous...

And the wind mills are too ugly >.>

and [insert green energy here] is too [insert untrue idiotic reason here]

I wonder how much anti-matter a static shock produces?

And remember, it was a bolt of lightning they needed in Back to the Future 1 to give the Flux Capacitor the energy required due to having no plutonium on hand in 1955......wonder if Doc Brown was on the verge of discovering antimatter?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Thunderstorms...gamma rays...it looks like we need a new Thor vs Hulk thread now that we have more scientific information to back us up.

I vote Thor because he can create Anti-matter!

And I have this sudden mental image of Positron in his armor pouting and going, "But I can do that too..."



Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

So, the anti-matter is created by a gamma ray burst. The obvious conclusion is that the Maestro is the Anti-Monitor.

The observation that apparently powerful thunderstorms can produce gamma rays has been floating around for a while. What the article describes is really additional information about the phenomenon. It isn't that the thunderstorms are producing antimatter directly, its that the gamma rays they produce are so energetic that they're decaying into electron/positron pairs that the satellite is detecting. It suggests additional details of the event and some additional clues as to the precise process that creates them.

One of the things people have been trying to figure out is where precisely in the thunderstorms are the gamma ray bursts being created. Knowing that could be important because commercial airliners do travel close enough to large thunderstorms for a gamma ray burst to be a potential health hazard. Not enough to kill necessarily, but more radiation than would ordinarily be considered safe on the ground. If the bursts are generated at very high altitudes and directed generally upward, that is a better scenario for air travelers. My suspicion is that these energetic positron beams are suggestive that this is what is happening.

A Sprite did it!

Or maybe some ELVES.