High-frequency electromagnetic flashes, once thought to be rare, may go off regularly alongside lightning in the atmosphere.
In 1994, physicists discovered flickers of γ-rays associated with lightning storms, but had seen relatively few of them. A team led by Nikolai Østgaard at the University of Bergen, Norway, looked for more of these terrestrial γ-ray flashes in data taken by the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager satellite in 2006 and 2012.
The researchers found nearly 200 flashes; these may be more common, and release more energy into the atmosphere, than scientists had suspected.
Geophys. Res. Lett. http://doi.org/97g (2015)
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High-energy flashes in the sky. Nature 528, 438 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/528438b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/528438b
