Well, continuing with the daily challenge as many in the community, I will continue to participate in #celestialchallenge this @Sirknight initiative, thanks to the community of @steemchurch.

A competitor has emerged from the light rays: The «dark rays» are an exotic form of electrical discharge inside storms that occur in alternation with normal rays. In a dark ray, very energetic particles are accelerated and can produce positrons, which help to discharge the electric field.

On August 21, 2009, a group of physicists who flew in an atmospheric research aircraft mistakenly entered a violent stormy front and was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of anti-matter. Since then, researchers have tried to come out of their astonishment and understand the extraordinary and unexpected phenomenon. Today, six years later, and although they still do not know what happened, they venture some possibilities in the Journal of Plasma Physics.

Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, was flying with a group of colleagues specialized in the study of electrical phenomena when the turbulent and unexpected encounter occurred. To carry out their work, the researchers had mounted a particle detector in a Gulfstream V, a type of jet widely used by senior executives.

Everything seemed to proceed normally on board until the plane was positioned just above an extremely violent storm. The pilots turned towards what on their radar appeared to be the Georgia coast. "But actually," Dwyer recalls, "it was a stormy front, and we just flew right through it." The plane was shaken violently and began to fall suddenly. "I really thought we were going to die", says Dwyer.

But during those moments of anguish, the instruments began to indicate something else. The plane, in fact, was surrounded by a «positron cloud» (antimatter particles opposed to electrons) that would not have had to be there at all. The cloud was approximately two km. of extension.

To bump face-to-face with a cloud of positrons without other associated physical phenomena (such as a strong emission of gamma rays) is something completely disconcerting and goes against our understanding of physics. In fact, the phenomenon can not be explained by any known process. "It was such a strange thing - says Dwyer himself - that we've been spinning it for several years".

In the words of the scientist, "the fact that, as if out of nowhere, the number of positrons around us suddenly increased by more than a factor of 10 and formed a cloud around the plane is very difficult to understand. And we really do not have a good explanation for it. "

It is known that, sometimes, the storms produce flashes of very energetic gamma rays, that can in turn generate pairs of electrons and positrons when they interact with the air. But the appearance of positrons must, of course, coincide with a large increase in the amount of gamma rays.

"We should have seen bright gamma-ray emissions next to positrons," says Dwyer. But the only thing we observed was, first, a cloud of positrons, and then another about seven km. away. And only after we could see a bright glow of gamma rays. Which does not make any sense ».

David Smith, from the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-author of the study, states that "we expected the storm to produce some forms of radiation, but not this. We do not even know if it is something that nature can do on its own or if it only happens when an airplane is included in the mix ».

In the Universe there are (separate dark matter) two different kinds of matter: the "normal" and the antimatter, which are identical except for the sign of their electric charge. Thus, for each particle "normal" there is an "antiparticle", which in the case of the electron is the positron. When a particle of matter meets another of antimatter, both annihilate each other in a flash of gamma rays. It is, Dwyer points out, the same kind of process that is supposed to power the Star Trek Enterprise ship.

Having been where he should not have been, Dwyer assures us that his experience "inside the belly of the beast", brings new information about the far and largely unknown world of storms, a strange universe of gamma rays, particles high energy that travel almost at the speed of light and, now, also of strange clouds of antimatter.

One possible explanation for the sudden appearance of positrons is that the airplane itself, in some way, influenced the electrical environment of the storm. But this, according to Dwyer, would be something very surprising. It would also be possible for researchers to detect some kind of exotic electrical discharge inside the storm, one that implies the existence of positrons.

Dark ray