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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

If I have to be careful with 20kv discharges generating x-rays, certainly it's within the realm of possibility that lighting bolts are generating y-rays, no?

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They want to figure out the details of why and how it happens.

I think snarfy is expressing incredulity that meteorology doesn't already account for these types of emmissions. Analogously, suppose the headline had read

> Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why.

"But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

We don't entirely have a mechanistic explanation for gravity either.

Yeah, I'm not a physicist sort, so I wouldn't know, but I was under the impression that while we have a good model for the "what" of gravity in most "classical" scenarios, and we can even model some weird gravity effects in weird situations, not all of the "whys" are answered and people don't know how to model gravity together with other phenomena.

I agree it is. And C.T.R. Wilson was talking about it in 1925. But the TGFs mentioned in the article are incredibly bright, and what we're trying to understand (I work in this field) is why one lightning flash makes only a modest amount of x- and gamma-rays, kind of what you might naively expect, and another makes a mind-boggling million times as many, which is not as simply understood.

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