By Peter Weiss
Pinkie-size marine crustaceans whose snappy noisemaking has already captivated scientists also stage some flashy pyrotechnics, researchers now find. While earlier experiments had shown that so-called snapping shrimp generate imploding air bubbles that make loud popping sounds (SN: 9/23/00, p. 199), a new study reveals that those collapsing bubbles emit flashes of light and may flare as hot as the sun’s surface.
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In the Oct. 4 Nature, Detlef Lohse of Twente University in Enschede, the Netherlands, and his colleagues present measurements of those light flashes. Using readings from a sensitive light detector called a photomultiplier tube, they offer the first evidence of a biological version of the phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.