NASA sent a retired Cold War spy plane on a storm-chasing mission, and it discovered that big thunderstorms are very radioactive.
Large thunderstorms produce so much gamma radiation that the clouds are actually glowing with it, according to a recent study, which used NASA’s ER-2 research plane to study gamma rays in tropical thunderstorms. University of Bergen space physicist Nikolai Østgaard and his colleagues published their findings in the journal Nature.
