By Erik Derr (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Apr 11, 2013 08:09 AM EDT

If you've ever been in an airplane that flew through a thunderstorm, chances are you were also exposed to flashes of gamma rays that produce radiation.

New research presented today at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna estimates how much radiation flight crews and passengers are receiving through so-called dark lighting, which was first discovered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1994.

 "The good news is that the doses are not super scary -- it could be worse," said lead researcher Joseph Dwyer, a physics professor at Florida Institute of Technology. "It's similar to going to the doctor's office and getting a CT scan."

Within the electrical fields of a thunderstorm, electrons accelerate toward the speed of light and collide with atoms, emitting gamma rays, says a report in Discovery.

After figuring out the dark lightning flashes occurred in patches of the sky through which airplanes commonly fly, Dwyer and his research team developed a physics-based model that explained how the charges are created.

Prior work anticipated how much radiation would be emitted during specific events, but couldn't predict the location or approximate size of the flashes produced.

But, with the new model, Dwyer's team was able to pinpoint the exposure dose that someone on an airplane might receive.

"This work is very important because it gets you into the zone where you start to understand how often and how likely they are to happen," University of California Santa Cruz physics professor David Smith, who was not involved in the study, told Discovery. But, "unless you have gamma ray detectors on board, no one would think anything of it."

Because the bursts of dark lightning are so brief - one typically lasting only about 10/100th of a microsecond -- they are usually undetected, although it's possible to see a diffuse, purple light, Dwyer said.

At this point, the researchers suggest, there's no need for pilots to change course to avoid thunderstorms, since that's already part of their job description.

Still, those who travel the friendly skies often might want to be mindful of the weather where they're scheduled to fly.

At the moment, said Dwyer, "it's kind of cool that it's been 250 years since Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, and we've realized there's a different kind of lightning going on that we never knew about." 

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