Thor’s Dark World, or Our Own? Dark Lightning

What do lightning and gamma rays have to do with each other, besides a battle between The Hulk and Thor?

For decades, scientists have been aware that thunderstorms were a terrestrial source of powerful gamma ray bursts due to satellites observing energy emissions from black holes and supernovae, but they were unaware of the actual mechanism until just recently.

It turns out lightning has a darker sibling. When lightning occurs, it is preceded by what scientists are calling, “dark lightning.”

As we know, regular lightning happens when positive and negative charges race to cancel each other out. When paths of electrons meet, we get a flash of light that is 5x hotter than the surface of the sun.

Dark lightning is created in a very similar way, but the effects are much greater. While not visible, dark lightning creates an explosion of electrons and positrons (matter and antimatter) usually a kilometer wide. These particles collide with air molecules at near the speed of light, which creates bursts of gamma wave radiation. This explosion is so large because when the gamma rays hit air molecules, this throws off even more protons and electrons, thus continuing the process, much like a nuclear reaction. All of this is invisible to the human eye, so we’ve never noticed it happening until we had instruments in space able to detect it.

As always, scientists will continue to study this phenomenon, but I personally hope that this is evidence of Hulk vs. Thor bleeding into our humble Earth-1218.