Physicists are trying to uncover the secret of a natural phenomenon that can disable the devices of airliners and undermine the health of passengers.
The serious danger to planes and air passengers was announced the other day at a conference of the European Geophysical Union in Vienna. A formidable phenomenon called "dark lightning" was discovered by scientists from the Florida Institute of Technology. These lightning bolts become powerful sources of gamma radiation and streams of charged particles that can damage electronics and irradiate people.
Experts assure that passengers in an airplane in a thunderstorm zone receive radiation doses as from ten "fluorographies". And even more - like a complete examination of the body in an X-ray tomograph.
“The human eye does not notice dark lightning,” explained physicist Joseph Dwyer, one of the authors of the study of these exotic lightning discharges. - But they are clearly visible from space. Satellites record pale purple-blue glowing zones in the clouds about a kilometer long. Dark lightning occurs at altitudes of about 12 kilometers. The radiation flux from the discharges goes mainly down - to where commercial airliners fly.
For the first time, the phenomenon, called at the beginning "electric storm", was discovered about 20 years by NASA satellites. But it still remains a mystery.
“We know for sure that cosmic rays and atmospheric electricity are involved in the birth of dark lightning,” admitted another conference participant, professor at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics Marco Tavani. - But how the discharges gain colossal power, we cannot even imagine. After all, the energy of quanta of the radiation of dark lightning is higher than that of ordinary light or even ultraviolet radiation, almost ten million times! Such radiation releases more energy than a nuclear reactor. Ordinary lightning, however, generates only weak X-rays.
Physicists believe that a system should be created to prevent these threats.
“The danger for the aircraft's instruments is not the gamma radiation of dark lightning itself, but the neutron flux that accompanies it and can affect the operation of the equipment,” explained Marco Tavani. - I do not exclude that part of the air disasters could be associated precisely with dark lightning. Indeed, until 1994, they were not even suspected.
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According to Dwyer, an exotic discharge can be recorded either with a dosimeter or by a faint pinkish flash - during a thunderstorm it is barely visible. And there was also hope for the Fermi telescope - one of the most sensitive and accurate instruments to date. It recently installed new software that physicists hope will allow detecting the weakest flashes - the harbingers of dark lightning.
SPECIALIST COMMENT
Candidate of Technical Sciences, Researcher of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University. Lomonosov Anatoly Ogushev:
“I think you shouldn't be too afraid of dark lightning. They are rare: about a thousand times less common than ordinary ones. Yes, and aircraft crews usually bypass thunder zones, so a direct hit even under ordinary lightning is very unlikely.