Meredith Hodnot
speaker
299 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Meredith Hodnot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But it might be cooler.
Apparently there's a whole generation of scientists who are using tools designed to look at things like solar flares and deep space explosions.
And they're pointing them at thunderstorms.
And they started to see bursts of freaking gamma rays inside thunderclouds.
What?
Right.
I mean, well, like gamma rays are on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Like they're a type of light.
So if you go past...
The visible spectrum, more and more energy, higher frequency, past ultraviolet light, more intense, more intense, past X-rays.
You start getting into like the most energetic type of light, these gamma rays.
And gamma rays are so intense, scientists usually see them when something really big happens, like a supernova explodes.
Yeah.
And they're happening in space.
Thunderstorms.
Even when there's not a visible lightning bolt, thunderstorm clouds glow and flicker with gamma rays.
This is way, way more energetic than the visual spectrum.
So it's associated with lightning.
But even when there's not lightning that we can see from the ground, thunderstorms are roiling with this high-powered light energy.
One astrophysicist in the article, Joseph Dwyer at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that really, really fast electrons, electrons going close to the speed of light, could be crashing into atoms in the air, releasing the violent gamma ray burst of light, and then that crashes into more electrons.
Showing 141–160 of 299 · page 8 of 15
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