Several years ago, a telescope in southern India observed a puzzling phenomenon: thunderstorms observed to the east appeared to be about six times more frequent than those observed to the west. This finding did not align with weather measurements on Earth, and it was unclear why the skies in one direction appeared more active than the other.
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Physics found that storms are not actually more frequent in the east. The issue is related to Earth's magnetic field and its influence on cosmic particles, which researchers use indirectly to explore the electricity within thunderclouds.
The results provide an explanation for the bias that appeared in the measurements of the GRAPS-3 telescope in India, and also reinforce the possibility of using particles known as muons to measure the enormous electrical potential differences that can be generated inside storms without the need to send devices into the heart of the clouds.
Hari Haran Balakrishnan, a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India and lead author of the study, says the secret lies in the fact that positive and negative muons do not reach the telescope in equal numbers.
The researcher explains that when these particles pass through the strong electric field within a thundercloud, the positive and negative muons are affected in opposite ways. Because the number of positive muons is greater, the effects do not completely cancel each other out; instead, a small change occurs in the total number of muons reaching the telescope.
By measuring this change, researchers can infer information about the electrical potential difference within the storm.
A mystery that lasted nearly a decade
However, analysis of the storm data revealed a problem that needed to be addressed before relying more heavily on this method. Between April 2011 and December 2020, the telescope detected 487 thunderstorms. 81.5% of the events it detected originated from the eastern part of its field of view, compared to only 13.7% from the west.
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