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Nature Podcast

Audio long-read: Thundercloud Project tackles a gamma-ray mystery

Nature Podcast

podcast@nature.com

News, Science, Technology

4.5 β€’ 893 Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Researchers in Japan are trying to understand why thunderstorms fire out bursts of powerful radiation.


Gamma rays – the highest-energy electromagnetic radiation in the universe – are typically created in extreme outer space environments like supernovae. But back in the 1980s and 1990s, physicists discovered a source of gamma rays much closer to home: thunderstorms here on Earth.


Now, researchers in Japan are enlisting an army of citizen scientists to help understand the mysterious process going on inside storm clouds that leads to them creating extreme bursts of radiation.


This is an audio version of our feature: Thunderstorms spew out gamma rays β€” these scientists want to know why



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1:30.3

This is an audio long read from nature. In this episode, thunderstorms spew out gamma rays. These scientists want to know why. Written by Lizzie Gibney and read by me,

1:38.5

Benjamin Thompson. On top of the Kanazawa Izumi Gauka High School, the wind whips at researchers Terawakianoto and Yuki Wada as they wrestle with a boxy instrument, trying to secure it to the roof.

1:46.9

A nearby weather vein swings ominously, and clouds gather over distant mountains,

1:52.9

all signs of the storm brewing in the direction of the Sea of Japan.

1:58.7

This is exactly the kind of weather Wada and Enoto are hoping for. The device they are

2:04.8

installing will spy on thunderstorms as they spit out gamma radiation, a mysterious process that

2:11.4

physicists are eager to understand. As the highest energy electromagnetic radiation in the

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