NASA offers Fermi data that confirms the phenomenon. [This NASA press release is written in a way -- with graphics! -- to make it both useful, and engaging for middle school students.] Here's the latest:
. . .A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays – some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe – coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes. So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?
Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases, this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth! When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all -- thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite. . . .
And -- no surprise. . . . The DC Circuit has told Tangerine he has no absolute immunity (upholding USDC Judge Tanya Chutkan's solid ruling -- in 57 pages of a PDF). Very shortly the Supremes will say. . . the same. Onward, grinning. [That's a legacy graphic of the Earth based Fermi-accelerator, but the above data came from a NASA Fermi spacecraft, in orbit, just to be clear.]
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