Lightning — The Particle That Arrived

The storm cloud was always doing this. Before any instrument could see it, before the word "gamma ray" existed, the cloud was seething with relativistic electrons and high-energy particle cascades. The lightning was the visible fraction — the moment the invisible machinery crossed a threshold you could see.

"If this mechanism is true, every time you see a lightning flash, there is a physical connection to a dying star somewhere in the galaxy."

— Joseph Dwyer, University of New Hampshire, 2026