Thursday, September 19, 2019

Wild


While flying from Munich to Singapore earlier this month, an industrious passenger took images of a passing lightning storm and caught something unexpected: gigantic jet lightning. The jet was captured on a single 3.2-second exposure above BhadrakIndia. Although the gigantic jet appears connected to the airplane's wing, it likely started in a more distant  thundercloud, and can be seen extending upwards towards Earth's ionosphere. The nature of gigantic jets and their possible association with other types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) such as blue jets and red sprites remains an active topic of research. 


2 comments:

  1. space lab missions took delight in photographing sprites and various electron ghosts atop very large thunderstorm cells from orbit. research into the phenomena was a real thing back in the 1980s.

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  2. Thunderstorms with enough energy to produce red sprites have been found to produce dark lightning - gamma ray bursts. That had been considered too energetic for weather but the measured data showed it.

    A professor at the Florida Institute of Technology discovered a physical model that could explain it.

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