Lightning strikes hitting the ground can produce ball lightning. Image Credit: PD - Codalo
Chinese researchers have managed to observe and film natural ball lightning for the first time.
Taking the form of a bright sphere of electrical energy, the enigmatic phenomenon was doubted to even exist at all until around the 1960s. Since then scientists have been able to recreate ball lightning in a lab, but nobody had ever been able to satisfactorily record a naturally occurring example.
Now a science team in China believe that they've achieved the impossible by recording footage of ball lightning that formed during a storm in Qinghai. Using a combination of spectrographs and video cameras, the researchers recorded the glowing orb of light as it rose 5 meters above the ground.
"There have been many research programs that routinely video or photograph natural and triggered lightning," said lightning specialist Martin Uman. "But none, as far as I am aware, has stumbled on a ball lightning."
The theory goes that when lightning strikes the ground it can store energy in silicon nanoparticles which then oxidize, releasing their energy in the form of a ball of pure silicon vapor.
They caught it on camera and a spectrograph, which is what is seen on the right side of the video. It would appear that ball lightning is in fact just oxidizing silicon vapor. Neat.
Hmmm, very interesting. Having been in a large electrical storm that lasted overnight at an altitude of 5000 feet in Colorado and having seen ball lightning for myself, I can't begin to understand what in the video would be considered ball lightning.
I could be wrong here, but I always thought ball lightning was when balls of electricity came rolling out along the ground. I remember reading about this in one of the Little House books and thought it was figment of the author's imagination. Years later, I found out it actually happens. And for some reason, I always thought that was called ball lightning.
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