In what sounds like a tale from the Bermuda Triangle, an atmospheric physicist, called Joseph Dwyer, was flying through a massive thunderstorm, when he suddenly found himself in the middle of a huge cloud of antimatter. The physicist was piloting a modified Gulfstream V plane on a scientific mission and came across the strange phenomenon by accident.

Dwyer and his co-pilot mistook a line of thunderstorms for the Georgia coast on their radar, but by the time they realized this, they had no way out.

As they entered the heart of the storm, the scientific instruments on board suddenly began to register something totally unexpected.

The plane was being surrounded by positron-electron explosions causing peaks of high-energy, photon gamma rays - a clear sign of antimatter.

The plane plunged downward and began to shake violently. "I really thought I was going to die," Dwyer said.

So what is antimatter?

ExtremeTech explains that;

"Antimatter is the name we give to particles with the same mass, but opposite charge, as the particles of which we are composed. When an antiparticle comes in contact with its corresponding "normal" particle, they annihilate each other and release gamma rays. In this case, the team detected a large number of positrons (the antiparticle of an electron) in that storm."

But the positrons in the storm seemed to somehow steer themselves towards the plane, and what force did that remains a mystery.
It is possible the plane itself was interacting with the antimatter. Nature says that the positrons could have been annihilated in the immediate vicinity of the aircraft, or even on the plane itself.

Aleksandr Gurevich, an atmospheric physicist at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, suggests that the plane's wings could have become charged, producing extremely intense electric fields around them, causing the creation of positrons.

Whether it's a drunk camper diving carelessly into a river, or a mass of air rising over a mountain, the rule is the same: What goes up must come down.

With respect to the latter, the rising and falling of air also generates gravity waves. While such atmospheric changes usually only have a regional impact on the lower atmosphere, these ripples can stretch all across the globe in the upper atmosphere and their impact is far more dramatic.

For the first time, researchers have found a way to observe what happens when gravity waves rise towards into the upper atmosphere. A team of researchers at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research led by Senior Scientist Hanli Liu improved upon the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, pushing it to a resolution fine enough to pick up small gravity waves at their source.

Previously able to clearly view only phenomena that were 2,000 kilometers across, they are now able to view gravity waves when they are still relatively small—only 200 kilometers across—and accurately model how this activity appears later in the upper atmosphere.

A little before noon Sunday, several diners at the new My Brothers Workshop Café and Bakery on Back Street almost leapt from their chairs and charged into the adjacent parking lot to see why some folks were gazing up in the sky.

Turns out it wasn't the end of the world, as someone had suggested. It was a solar halo surrounding the sun, as the name implies; and it seemed to absorb the whole sky.

According to Wikipedia: A halo, also known as a nimbus, is produced by light interacting with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, resulting in a wide variety of colored or white rings, arcs and spots in the sky."

Closer to home, University of the Virgin Islands physics professor David Smith shared a professional view on the phenomenon.

"Ice crystals in the upper atmosphere create this halo, like little rainbows," he said. "It's produced by light interacting with the ice crystals."

Smith said the phenomenon isn't all that rare further north.

"It's not as common in the tropics, since there are fewer ice crystals in the upper atmosphere," he said.

Moms across the city received a gift from the heavens yesterday when a beautiful pearl-colored halo around the sun greeted them on Mother's Day morning.

While some web users saw this as a celestial blessing for Shanghai moms, the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau had a more prosaic explanation.

It was a result of altostratus cloud, formed by the lifting of a large stable air mass, explained forecasters.

That causes invisible water vapor to condense into cloud, creating optical phenomena — such as the sun halo.

Around 10am, many Weibo and WeChat users posted pictures, with many seeing it as a good omen.

According to a Chinese proverb: "When there is a solar halo, it will rain; when there is a lunar halo, it will blow."

And sure enough, rain was forecast overnight.

This is Supernova SN 1987A, one of the brightest stellar explosions since the invention of the telescope more than 400 years ago.

Supernova 1987A exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy about 168,000 light-years away. The light from the supernova arrived here in 1987. Dominating the image are three glowing loops of stellar material, formed when the fast expanding supernova collided with the dense, slower moving material in the stellar wind.

This stellar wind was ejected by the former star about 20,000 years before it went supernova. These collisions cause intense heating and the production of powerful optical and X-ray energy emissions.

Outer, ejected materials lit up first, followed by the innermost materials powered by radioactive isotopes, such as cobalt-56, which decayed into iron-56.

There are still many mysteries surrounding these structures, and their origin remains largely unknown. Another mystery is that of the missing neutron star at the heart of the supernova.

The star that exploded to create SN1987A was a blue supergiant known as Sanduleak -69° 202. Blue supergiants can have surface temperatures of over 50,000°C, and can be a million times as luminous as the Sun.

The violent death of a high-mass star, such as SN 1987A, leaves behind a stellar remnant in the form of either a neutron star or a stellar mass black hole.

However astronomers have been unable to find a neutron star in the remnants of SN1987A, possibly because it's surrounded by an extremely dense cloud of thick dust. It's also possible that so much material fell back onto the neutron star that it further collapsed into a stellar mass black hole.

Astronomers are baffled by the discovery of a mysterious fog of high energy X-rays blasting out of the centre of our galaxy.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, challenges our understanding of the physics taking place in the galactic centre.

The astronomers speculate the mysterious cloud could be generated by a vast graveyard of thousands of stellar remnants clustered in the shadow of the supermassive black hole.

But the source still eludes them.

"This is something that has never been seen before, I only wish we knew what it is that we discovered," says one of the study's authors Professor Chuck Hailey of the University of Columbia in New York.

"We have quite a few theories of what it could be, but none of them fits the facts, so at this point it's something of a mystery."

The international team of scientists discovered the huge X-ray cloud during observations using the NuSTAR X-ray Observatory to study a region 30 light-years wide around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

"There really was no evidence to suggest that there should be this diffused foggy type of high energy X-rays in the region around the central black hole," says Hailey.

While waiting for her train this morning at the Glen Cove train station in Long Island, NY, Amanda Curtis grabbed her phone and snapped a photo of an incredibly rare atmospheric phenomenon: A quadruple rainbow.

When she posted the photo on Twitter - where it went viral, some folks were incredulous. They said the photo was photoshopped or that Curtis had shot it through glass, causing a reflection.

But, in the interview posted below, Curtis told The Weather Channel the image was authentic and taken in the open air:

At first we thought this quadruple rainbow picture was fake, but then we were blown away. For more amazing weather stories, check out the AMHQ with Sam Champion page on Facebook.

Posted by The Weather Channel on Tuesday, April 21, 2015

The photo was convincing to Paul Neiman, who works as a research meteorologist at NOAA's Earth System Research Observatory.

Australia admits it may look at a new patch of ocean. What's more worrying than the undiscovered yet is that not one piece of floating wreckage has been spotted where it should've washed up.

Something significant was missing when senior ministers from Malaysia, Australia and China announced a new effort to find the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on Thursday. There was no mention of what is fast becoming the most perplexing feature of this multi-layered mystery: why has no floating wreckage turned up?

Make no mistake, the more time that passes without a single piece of floating wreckage being found the stranger it gets.

There is no previous case in the history of modern intercontinental jets where a crash into an ocean has not produced floating wreckage - and within days of the disaster. No matter how violent the impact of an airplane hitting the water there will always be some scattered debris that never sinks.

Last fall the Australian Transport Safety Board, who are directing the sea search for the Boeing 777, said they had assigned a team of experts usually used to predict the path of oil spills to produce a "drift model" - a highly sophisticated calculation combining ocean currents, wind and weather patterns and knowledge of the buoyancy of airplane wreckage - in order to predict when and where wreckage from Flight 370 would appear in places where it would be spotted.

At that time the Australians said that their best guess was that wreckage could take as long as a year to appear and that the most likely place was the long coastline of Western Sumatra on the Indonesian archipelago.

With more than a year gone by nothing has turned up.

A severe geomagnetic storm has whipped through Earth's magnetosphere, putting on a light show at both ends of the earth.

The storm, which began on Tuesday, is among the strongest in the current 11-year solar cycle, earning a rating of a "severe" G4 on a one-to-five scale, which means it had the potential to affect power grids, high-frequency communications and satellite operations.

Interestingly, there was no radiation storm, which typically accompanies geomagnetic storms of this magnitude. Therefore, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center was not expecting disruption to satellite electronics or polar-routed aviation.

But the changes in density in the ionosphere - the very high levels of Earth's atmosphere - could cause more drag on low-orbit satellites, which operators may have to adjust for with thrusters. Simple GPS technology, like the kind in your car or on your smartphone, could be affected in the form of difficulties locating your position.

Swirling through the air in mesmerising saucer-like shapes, these exceptionally rare lenticular clouds are the most common explanation for UFO sightings. The remarkable-looking disc shapes were spotted by amateur photographer Glenn Spencer, 42, in the sky above Chester in Cheshire.

The formations, also known as wave clouds, were scattered over miles, producing a stunning spectacle. Rarely seen in the UK, lenticular clouds are formed when a tall geographic feature, such as the the top of a mountain, obstructs a strong wind.

The interruption in airflow creates a wind wave pattern in the atmosphere on one side of the mountain and at the top of these waves, moisture in the air condenses and forms a cloud. As air moves down into the trough of these waves the water evaporates again, leaving behind clouds in a characteristic lenticular shape.

Mr Spencer noticed them while driving to the shops and was so amazed that he stopped the car to retrieve his camera from the boot. He said: 'I tried to follow them to higher ground to get a good view. They were just so mesmerising and I thought they looked amazing. It is easy to see why people mistake them for UFOs. They are brilliant. I've never seen anything like it.'