Antimatter and radioisotopes created during thunderstorms by lightning.

Lightning is more than fascinating. A ginormous strike of electric energy during a thunderstorm creates weird effects that we wouldn’t expect there.

Lighting - Source: CC0 Creating Commons

A storm is coming. The sky darkens. Thunder is audible in the distance. Suddenly a violent lightning flashes through the silence. That’s what a thunderstorm looks like. People know them all around the world and they are always epic and somewhat mysterious. And scientists now confirm that thunderstorms bring certainly interesting things.

Teruaki Enoto - Source: RIKEN

A team of Japanese researchers led by Teruaki Enoto from the Kyoto University published a study in Nature magazine that claims some gamma-ray photons react with particles in the air. When that happens radioisotopes and even positrons (anti-matter particles that are the opposites of electrons) are being created.
But Enoto and his colleagues got into financial problems while building a system of small gamma-ray detectors, so they turned to the public for help in a crowd-sourcing campaign. This campaign was successful.
In February 2017 they managed to detect a significant gamma-ray impulse near the city of Kashiwazaki.

Reaction after a lightning strike - Source: Kyoto University/Teruaki Enoto

When the scientists analyzed the data, they managed to differentiate three separate gamma-ray bursts. The first lasted less than a millisecond, second for a few tenths of milliseconds and the last emission lasted for about a minute.
The first gamma-ray burst was created directly by the lightning strike. The second is created by the gamma-rays from the lightning reacting with nitrogen in the atmosphere forcing a neutron from the nitrogen atom. And the last, longest, gamma-ray burst is created by the splitting of unstable atoms of nitrogen that lost a neutron. This process leads to the creation of positrons that soon collide with electrons and annihilate, releasing more gamma-rays.