Hundreds of spectators who attended the recent launch of a Chinese rocket witnessed a truly shocking sight when a bolt of lightning struck the ascending vehicle in midair.

Stunning photos show the exact moment the zigzagging beam of electricity surged around the rocket's fuselage and through its exhaust plume before shooting down toward Earth's surface.

Despite being hit with at least 100 million volts of electricity, the uncrewed rocket safely reached space and successfully deployed its payload in orbit.

The stricken spacecraft, a Long March 3B rocket, lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China on July 23 at around 8 p.m. local time, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. But around 30 seconds after leaving the ground, the rocket was suddenly hit by lightning, which illuminated the sky in the blink of an eye.

Video footage from the launch (see below) shows a large crowd of people with raincoats and umbrellas collectively gasping as lightning hits the rocket and then loudly cheering as the spacecraft continues its climb, unimpeded by the electrical discharge.

A translated statement from the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. released later the same day said the mission was a "complete success" and that the Long March 3B correctly deployed its payload, the Tianlian-2 (06) satellite, a geostationary relay satellite that will help support China's Tiangong space station.

However, the statement did not mention the lightning strike.

Modern spacecraft are designed to have highly conductive shells that divert massive electrical charges around their exteriors without impacting critical interior infrastructure or any crew they might be carrying. This works similarly to a Faraday cage, a protective enclosure that prevents certain types of electromagnetic radiation from entering or exiting. Similar designs are also used in commercial planes, which are struck by lightning at least once per year, on average, according to the National Weather Service.

Despite this, rockets normally launch only in good weather to minimize the risk.

Previous incidents

It is unclear exactly how many rockets have been struck by lightning throughout the history of spaceflight, but there have been several notable examples.

Perhaps the most famous incident was during NASA's Apollo 12 mission, which successfully landed a trio of astronauts — Charles Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon — on the lunar surface in November 1969. Shortly after liftoff, the Saturn V rocket carrying the astronauts was struck by lightning twice as it climbed into the atmosphere. Some nonessential instruments and sensors experienced "permanent effects" from the strikes, according to one recently released report. However, these issues did not stop the spacecraft from safely ferrying the astronauts to the moon and back.

Most recently, in 2019, a Russian Soyuz rocket was struck by lightning while carrying a communications satellite into low Earth orbit, Ars Technica reported.

Lightning can also hit rockets on the launchpad, which is what happened in the lead-up to the Artemis I mission in 2022. The uncrewed Space Launch System rocket, which launched NASA's first moon mission in 50 years, was struck by lightning during a "wet dress rehearsal" around seven months before launch. However, strikes like these are exceedingly rare nowadays, as most launchpads are surrounded by towers designed to attract lightning away from standing rockets, according to The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Although these spacecraft remained relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for an Atlas-Centaur rocket (dubbed AC-67) that was destroyed in 1987 after being struck by lightning 48 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A NASA report later revealed that the electrical discharge had triggered a "single-word memory alteration" in the rocket's navigational computer, which caused it to veer sideways and completely break apart.

The ubiquitous squeak of sneakers on a basketball court may be caused by more than just friction, a new study suggests.

Researchers have found that the sharp chirp of rubber on a hard floor happens when tiny areas of slipping between the shoe's sole and the floor move at supersonic speeds — and, in some experiments, the process involved miniature, lightning-like sparks. What's more, the findings could lead to an improved understanding of earthquakes and aid in the design of grippy surfaces.

The new study, published Feb. 25 in the journal Nature, shows that soft rubber does not slide the way many people imagine. Instead of the whole sole sticking and then slipping at once, motion bunches into fast, wrinkle-like fronts called "opening slip pulses" that detach and reattach the rubber across the contact zone. Those repeating pulses generate the vibrations that our ears hear as squeaks.

Scientists have long explained squeaks from shoes, bicycle brakes and tires using stick-slip friction, a stop-and-go cycle in which surfaces repeatedly catch and then break free. That model works well for many hard-on-hard systems, like door hinges.

But soft materials like rubber behave differently when they slide across rigid surfaces.

To understand the physics of this process, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) teamed up with experts from the University of Nottingham in the U.K. and the French National Center for Scientific Research. They used high-speed optical imaging and synchronized audio to watch soft rubber move quickly along smooth glass.

But what they saw was not smooth sliding. Instead, motion bunched up into opening slip pulses, sweeping across the rubber in starts and stops.

"Fundamentally, these findings challenge the long-held assumption that soft-material friction can be fully captured by simplified, one-dimensional ‘stick-slip’ models," first study author Adel Djellouli, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, told Live Science in an email.

Tiny lightning everywhere

The findings reveal more about the physics of friction. In classic stick-slip friction, the whole contact surface alternates between sticking and slipping. In this study, however, the motion was more localized, as only small regions opened and slipped, and then moved on, while other regions stayed in full contact.

For some experiments, the team also saw tiny flashes caused by the friction, which they described as miniature "lightning" sparks. In some tests, those sparks, or electrical discharges, appeared to trigger the slip pulses. The sparks were not the main source of the squeaking noise, but they showed how electrical energy could build up in the system when the rubber moved.

The researchers also found that the rubber's shape, more than its movement, was the main determinant of the squeak's pitch.

When flat rubber blocks slid across the glass, the slip pulses were irregular, producing a broad "whoosh" rather than a clean squeak. But when the researchers added thin ridges to the rubber, the ridges confined the pulses and made them repeat at regular intervals.

In effect, the ridges acted like guides, channeling the pulses into a repeating cycle. This locked the sound into a specific frequency, or tone. The team found that this squeak frequency depended mainly on the height of the rubber ridges.

In fact, the pattern was so reliable that the team designed blocks of different heights and used them to play the Imperial March theme from "Star Wars" by hand.

"When it came time to actually play the Star Wars theme song, we had to rehearse for three solid days to get the video right," said Djellouli. "None of us are exactly trained in making music with squeaky rubber blocks, so getting the timing and technique down took a lot of practice. I think the funniest part was the relief in the lab when we finally finished the recording after three days of constant, high-pitched squeaking. Our colleagues were very happy to finally have some quiet again!"

What sneakers may have in common with earthquakes

The findings have implications beyond shoe design. The slip pulses in the experiments share key features with rupture fronts in earthquakes, where sections of a fault suddenly break and slide at very high speeds.

"Soft friction is usually considered slow, yet we show that the squeak of a sneaker can propagate as fast as, or even faster than, the rupture of a geological fault, and that their physics is strikingly similar," study co-author Shmuel Rubinstein, a professor of physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor at SEAS, said in a statement.

Beyond shedding light on the physics of earthquakes, the work could help engineers design surfaces that switch between slippery and grippy states on demand.

"Tuning frictional behavior on the fly has been a long-standing engineering dream," Katia Bertoldi, a professor of applied mechanics at Harvard, said in the statement. "This new insight into how surface geometry governs slip pulses paves the way for tunable frictional metamaterials that can transition from low-friction to high-grip states on demand."

A striking new photo shows an eerie, UFO-like halo of red light seemingly hovering over a tiny town in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

The eye-catching image is remarkably reminiscent of another photo, taken in March 2023, which captured a near-identical red ring that briefly appeared over the same place.

Nature photographer Valter Binotto captured both of the rings over Possagno, a small town of around 2,200 people in northern Italy. The latest luminous halo was snapped on Nov. 17 at around 10:45 p.m. local time, and it appears to be slightly fainter than the one from two and a half years ago.

The red rings are actually examples of a rare lightning-related phenomenon dubbed "emission of light and very low-frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources," or ELVEs, which occur during particularly intense thunderstorms, Spaceweather.com reported.

People rarely notice ELVEs because they are almost impossible to see with the naked eye. They flash in the sky for around one thousandth of a second, which is around 100 times quicker than it takes to blink. Therefore, photographers like Binotto either have to get really lucky or come equipped with special devices attached to their cameras to spot them.

ELVEs form when powerful lightning bolts shoot electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) up toward space, where they collide with the ionosphere — the ionized part of the upper atmosphere that stretches between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 644 kilometers) above the ground. Once there, they excite nitrogen molecules, which briefly give off red light, similar to how auroras form. (Although red auroras are the result of oxygen, not nitrogen.)

"The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth's ionosphere," Binotto told Spaceweather.com. In this case, the EMP was released by a lightning bolt with an electrical current of approximately 303 kilo-amperes, which is between 10 and 30 times higher than an average thunderstorm discharge, he added.

Given the rarity of ELVEs, which were discovered only in the 1990s from photos taken by NASA's space shuttles, you may be wondering what is so special about Possagno that causes these rings to appear there so often. And the answer is: nothing.

Instead, these photos are merely the result of Binotto's skill and experience in photographing ELVEs, and it is only a coincidence that he happened to take them both from the same place.

ELVEs are massive and appear high up in the atmosphere, meaning that they can be photographed from anywhere within a radius spanning hundreds of miles. In the latest photo, for example, the ELVE resulted from a thunderstorm near Vernazza, around 185 miles (300 km) south of Possagno. The 2023 ring was triggered by a storm near Ancona, around 174 miles (280 km) southeast of the northern town (see below).

The latest red halo likely spanned around 125 miles (200 km) across and appeared at an altitude of around 60 miles (100 km) above the ground, according to Spaceweather.com.

ELVEs, sprites and gigantic jets

ELVES are just one of several rare optical phenomena that are collectively known as transient luminous events (TLEs), which are all linked to specific types of lightning strikes.

Other TLEs include red "jellyfish" sprites, made of zig-zagging plasma tendrils that streak through the ionosphere, and upward-shooting "gigantic jets," which are towering blue-colored lights that can often be seen from space.

The electrical fields of ELVEs can also act as particle accelerators, creating X-rays, relativistic electrons and "terrestrial gamma ray flashes," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These secondary effects pose no risk to people on the ground, but remain of great interest to scientists who can use them as a proxy for studying powerful cosmic rays.

However, it is unclear if the ELVES photographed by Binotto produced any of these effects.

A lightning bolt that spanned five states in the Great Plains has set a new record for the longest lightning bolt ever recorded, the World Meteorological Organization has confirmed.

The "megaflash" zipped across 515 miles (829 kilometers) from eastern Texas through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas to near Kansas City, Missouri, in seven seconds, beating the previous record of 477 miles (768 km).

The flash occurred on Oct. 22, 2017, but it was too long to be fully measured by ground-based sensors at the time. Now, a new study that used data from a geostationary satellite has finally documented the massive scope of the bolt. The researchers published their findings Thursday (July 31) in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as additional high-quality lightning measurements accumulate over time," study senior author Randall Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

Exactly how lightning gets its initial spark is still contested. But scientists know it arises when electrons pool in one region of a storm cloud, thus creating an ionized path in the air between which the electrons can flow from regions of negative to positive charge.

In some storm clouds, particularly the huge clusters that form over hotspots such as the Great Plains, understudied dynamics within the clouds can lead to discharges that stretch beyond 60 miles (100 km) — earning them the title of "megaflashes."

Related: Lightning on Earth is sparked by a powerful chain reaction from outer space, simulations show

In the study, the scientists reconstructed the flash's length by analyzing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-16 satellite — one of four of the agency's satellites with mappers that continuously monitor the ground for zaps of lightning. Using new algorithms, the scientists separated the bolt from millions of other light flashes to reveal its full extent.

"Our weather satellites carry very exacting lightning detection equipment that we can use to document the millisecond when a lightning flash starts and how far it travels," Cerveny said.

Experts say that, beyond highlighting the impressive advancements in new weather-monitoring technologies, the discovery is an important reminder that lightning can strike far from the storm cells where it was initially generated.

"It illustrates the threat of the newly recognized 'bolt from the gray,'" analogous to the 'bolt from the blue' from isolated cells, but one that can travel many hundreds of kilometers from the main charge generating region," co-author Walt Lyons, president of FMA Research, a forensic meteorology investigation firm in Fort Collins, Colorado, said in a statement.

"If lightning is within 10 km [6.2 miles] as found with reliable lightning data, go to the lightning safe building or vehicle," he added. "As these extreme cases show, lightning can arrive within seconds over a long distance, but they are embedded within larger thunderstorms, so be aware."

The energy needed for thunderstorms could come from an avalanche of electrons seeded by extraterrestrial cosmic rays, a new study claims.

Scientists already knew that lightning is an electrical discharge between thunderclouds and Earth's surface, but exactly how storm clouds obtain an electric field powerful enough to hurl a bolt has remained a mystery for centuries.

Now, a new study has used computer models to reveal that lightning strikes as the result of a powerful chain reaction that begins in outer space. The researchers published their findings July 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

"Our findings provide the first precise, quantitative explanation for how lightning initiates in nature," study lead author Victor Pasko, a professor of electrical engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said in a statement. "It connects the dots between X-rays, electric fields and the physics of electron avalanches."

Lightning's electrical nature was famously confirmed by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. Franklin's iconic, though often misrepresented, experiment involved flying a kite affixed to a 1-foot-long (0.3 meters) wire on one end and a twine string attached to a key with the other, which Franklin held with a silk ribbon. When a storm arrived, the kite became electrified and the twine became wet, so that a small spark jumped from the key to his outstretched finger.

Despite this discovery, data recorded by planes and weather balloons show that the electrical field needed for electrons to cascade down to Earth is around 10 times greater than the one actually measured inside storm clouds.

Related: 'Killer electrons' play pinball with space weather around Earth

There are two competing theories to explain how lightning actually occurs. The first, atmospheric static electricity, posits that the friction between ice clumps in storm clouds separates negatively charged electrons from atoms, causing them to pool until they ionize particles in the atmosphere below them, freeing enough electrons to race to the ground along multiple forking paths.

In the second theory, this initial ionization is achieved by cosmic rays — high-energy subatomic particles (mostly protons) from outer space that strike the upper atmosphere. These rays come from the sun; stellar explosions called supernovas; rapidly spinning neutron stars called pulsars; and other, unknown sources. When the cosmic particles strike the atmosphere, they create a runaway breakdown of electrons that ends in a ground-striking cascade.

In the new study, the researchers pooled data from ground-based sensors, satellites and high-altitude spy planes, and matched the information to a mathematical model that simulated the conditions in a storm cloud preceding a strike.

The model's simulations supported the cosmic ray theory, showing that electrons produced by high-speed protons accelerated along electric-field lines and multiplied as they struck molecules in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen and oxygen. This leads to an avalanche of electrons, producing the high-energy photons that initiate lightning, the researchers say.

Strikingly, the model also explains why flashes of gamma-rays — high energy photons — and X-rays occur before lightning strikes.

"In our modeling, the high-energy X-rays produced by relativistic electron avalanches generate new seed electrons driven by the photoelectric effect in air, rapidly amplifying these avalanches," Pasko said. "In addition to being produced in very compact volumes, this runaway chain reaction can occur with highly variable strength, often leading to detectable levels of X-rays, while accompanied by very weak optical and radio emissions. This explains why these gamma-ray flashes can emerge from source regions that appear optically dim and radio silent."

A wildfire has ignited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, burning down the Grand Canyon Lodge and other historic cabins.

Firefighters were managing the Dragon Bravo Fire, started by a lightning strike, when an uncommonly strong gust of wind pushed the fire beyond multiple containment features on Friday (July 11), according to InciWeb, the U.S. government's incident information management system website.

The fire then exhibited "extreme and volatile" behavior on Saturday (July 12), expanding by 500 acres (0.8 square miles) according to a statement released by the National Park Service (NPS). Conditions in the region are hot, dry and windy, making it more challenging for firefighters.

A second wildfire, named the White Sage Fire, is burning around 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of the Dragon Bravo Fire in Kaibab National Forest.

"Preliminary assessments indicate that between 50 to 80 structures have been lost, including NPS administrative buildings and visitor facilities," NPS representatives wrote in the statement. "No injuries or loss of life have been reported, and all staff and residents were successfully evacuated prior to the fire’s escalation."

Related: 'We are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age': Humans have plunged Earth into the 'Pyrocene'

Most wildfires are started by humans, either accidentally or on purpose, but lightning is a common natural cause, responsible for around 10% of global forest fires. Lightning can be as hot as 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 degrees Celsius) — five times hotter than the surface of the sun — and pack as much as 5 gigajoules of energy. These sparks of electricity are more than capable of igniting dry vegetation and can set multiple trees alight in an instant.

The Dragon Bravo Fire began on July 4 and was initially managed as part of a confine and contain strategy. However, the fire has been growing at night, when visibility is reduced and firefighters can't use aerial resources to drop fire retardant and water on the fire, according to InciWeb.

The fires also damaged a nearby water treatment facility, which released toxic chlorine gas. The gas leak meant firefighters had to evacuate from critical zones near the fire, according to the NPS statement.

The Dragon Bravo Fire has currently burned around 5,000 acres (7.8 sq/m) of land, while the larger White Sage Fire currently covers around 50,000 acres (78 sq/m), according to the wildfire live tracking non-profit Watch Duty. Both were active at the time of writing, with strong winds, hot temperatures and low humidity driving them, NPS representatives wrote.

"With continued active fire behavior and ongoing risks to personnel and infrastructure, the North Rim will remain closed to all visitor access for the remainder of the 2025 season," NPS representatives wrote.

A NASA astronaut has captured an electrifying image of Earth from space, featuring a gigantic, jellyfish-shaped "sprite" of red lightning shooting upwards above a thunderstorm in North America. The rare phenomenon is still poorly understood, despite being studied for more than 30 years.

Nichole Ayers, the pilot of SpaceX's Crew-10 mission and member of International Space Station (ISS) expeditions 72 and 73, snapped the striking photo on Thursday (July 3) as the space station passed above a large thunderstorm hanging over parts of Mexico and the southern U.S., including California and Texas.

"Just. Wow. As we went over Mexico and the U.S. this morning, I caught this sprite," Ayers wrote on the social platform X. "Sprites are TLEs or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below," she added.

TLEs are a range of visual phenomena that occur in the upper atmosphere during thunderstorms, including upward-shooting blue jets and UFO-like rings of light, known as ELVES. However, the most common TLEs are sprites, like the one photographed by Ayers.

Sprites are sometimes referred to as jellyfish because they contain multiple branches of light that spread out like tentacles, while others call them "carrots" because they can be accompanied by fainter tendrils that trail behind them in the opposite direction like plant roots. They are often associated with large thunderstorms, including those produced by hurricanes.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky

Sprites can range in size and shape, with the largest reaching up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface. They have a red color because they interact with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Sprites were first properly observed in the 1950s by airline passengers but were not photographed until 1989. The red jellyfish have also been spotted in the atmosphere of Jupiter, and they are thought to occur on Saturn and Venus, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

But despite years of research, researchers are still unsure why some lightning strikes cause sprites and others don't, according to FOX Weather.

TLEs from space

Sprites and other TLEs can be photographed from Earth's surface if the conditions are right. However, ISS astronauts are uniquely well-positioned to see TLEs and frequently see the flashes of lightning strikes at the same time, providing useful data to help researchers figure out how these phenomena work.

"We have a great view above the clouds, so scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, and relationship of TLEs to thunderstorms," Ayers wrote.

One of the most recent examples of this was in March, when an unnamed ISS astronaut snapped faint red sprites glowing at the end of a "gigantic jet" of lightning shooting upward above New Orleans.

Another excellent example was an eerie red jellyfish that seemed to float independently in Earth's atmosphere, high above a flash of lightning in June 2024, Space.com previously reported.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured breathtaking video of a rare atmospheric phenomenon from his perch high above Earth on the International Space Station.

While the International Space Station (ISS) was orbiting above South America, Pettit recorded what are known as Transient Luminous Events, or TLEs. These are bright, colorful flashes of light faster than lightning and are sometimes referred to as "sprites."

Pettit was able to view the sprites from directly above, looking down at what is known as the nadir, the point directly below a particular location. "OK, this is kind of out there and caters to your inner Uber-Geek," Pettit posted to X (formerly Twitter along with the video. "Nadir view of Transient Luminous Events (TLE ) or upper atmospheric lightning."

The video captures around six seconds of sprites over the Amazon basin. And it's not the first time these phenomena have been caught on camera from the ISS.

In 2024, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick caught a glimpse at one of the most elusive atmospheric phenomena known as red sprites. These occur during particularly powerful thunderstorms and travel upwards into the atmosphere, as opposed to normal lightning which travels downward to the surface of Earth.

Sprites like the ones Pettit captured on video occur much higher than regular lightning. Their name is an acronym, short for stratospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification.

Sprites are created when electrical discharges created by lightning shoot upward, creating bursts of plasma in the ionosphere, found around 50 miles (80 km) above Earth's surface. They were not captured on camera until 1989.

Originally posted on Space.com.

A newly unveiled photo captured by an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) provides a rare glimpse at an upward-shooting "gigantic jet" of lightning likely extending more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the U.S. coast.

The striking image was taken by an unnamed ISS crewmember on Nov. 19, 2024, but it was not initially shared by NASA or any other space organization. However, photographer Frankie Lucena, who specializes in capturing giant lightning sprites, stumbled across photos of the event on the Gateway to Astronaut photography of Earth website and shared them with Spaceweather.com, which reshared the shots Feb. 26.

"I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event, and found that there were 4 photos [of lightning] in all," Lucena told Spaceweather.com. The images can be viewed in a time-lapse video posted on YouTube, but only one has an associated jet.

The exact location of the jet is unclear because thunderclouds are covering Earth's surface in the images. However, based on the position of the ISS at the time, the jet likely occurred just off the coast of New Orleans, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey

Gigantic jets are massive lightning bolts that shoot upward from thunderstorms when the charged layers of the clouds get temporarily inverted. They mainly give off a blue light due to the high levels of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and usually last less than a second.

Most observed gigantic jets reach the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere that begins around 50 miles above Earth's surface and contains charged particles captured from the sun. This has earned the phenomenon the nickname "Earth's tallest lightning," according to Spaceweather.com. However, the exact height of the newly photographed bolt is unclear.

Gigantic jets are also extremely energetic. The most powerful recorded example of this phenomenon, which occurred during a thunderstorm over Oklahoma in May 2018, contained roughly 60 times more energy than a standard lightning bolt and reached up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,400 degrees Celsius).

These jets often terminate with tendrils of branching red lightning, which can be faintly seen in the new image. These additional discharges are very similar to "sprites," which often look like giant electric jellyfish. However, gigantic jets are a separate phenomenon from traditional sprites, which occur without jets, according to EarthSky.com.

Gigantic jets were first discovered relatively recently, in 2001 — so only a few dozen photographs of these massive bolts have ever been captured, according to Spaceweather.com. However, scientists think there could be up to 1,000 unseen jets every year.

Most of these images have been taken from space, but some others, including a breathtaking image from September 2018, have also been snapped by airplane passengers flying over thunderstorms.

New photos have revealed a pair of gigantic white thunderstorms raging in one of Jupiter's large reddish brown belts. The swirling storms, which are likely spewing giant green lightning bolts through the gas giant's cloudy atmosphere, could end up diluting the belt's rusty color, drastically changing the planet's appearance, experts say.

Astrophotographer Michael Karrer captured the stunning new images on Nov. 30 using an 8-inch Celestron telescope from near his home in Austria. The photos show two large white patches sitting side by side in the gas giant's Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB) — an enormous dark band of clouds that spins around Jupiter as it rotates.

"These [white patches] are giant thunderstorms," John Rogers, an astronomer at the British Astronomical Association who specializes in Jupiter, told Spaceweather.com. "The last time we saw storms like this [on Jupiter] was 8 years ago in 2016-17."

The storms likely extend around 60 miles (100 kilometers) below Jupiter's swirling surface and, although their exact widths have not been calculated yet, both storms "are wide enough to swallow Earth with room to spare," according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: 7 solar system worlds where the weather is crazy

The storms are not large enough to stay intact for long periods, like Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot, and will instead get pulled apart, Rogers explained. As this happens, the thunderstorm’s ghostly hues will mix in with the rest of the SEB’s rusty clouds, "causing the familiar brown belt to fade as its color is diluted by the white storm front," Spaceweather.com reported. If you look closely at the image, you can already see this starting to happen as several thin streams of white trail behind the thunderstorms.

This color-changing has happened before. In fact, the SEB had previously become so diluted by storms that it "disappeared" between 1973 and 1991, and briefly in 2010, according to Astronomy Magazine. However, it's too soon to say whether these new storms will erase the current rust-colored belt.

Thunderstorms on Jupiter are powered by convection, or churning, within clouds similarly to their terrestrial counterparts, and also produce lightning. However, unlike Earth's lightning, which often has a blue hue caused by water vapor, Jovian lightning bolts tend to be green, thanks to atmospheric ammonia, according to NASA.

Jupiter has just passed its closest point to Earth, known as "opposition," making it bright enough to clearly see with the naked eye and a great target for backyard astronomers and photographers like Karrer. The planet reached its closest point to us on Friday (Dec. 6) when Earth is directly between the solar system's largest world and the sun, but will remain clearly visible for the next few weeks.

If you have a decent backyard telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars then you can get a good look at Jupiter for yourself by searching for it in the Taurus constellation.

Wildfire blowups, fire whirls, towering thunderstorms: When fires get large and hot enough, they can actually create their own weather.

In these extreme fire situations, firefighters' ordinary methods to directly control the fire don't work, and wildfires burn out of control. Firefighters have seen many of these risks in the enormous Park Fire burning near Chico, California, and other wildfires in summer 2024.

But how can a fire create weather?

I'm an atmospheric scientist who uses data collected by satellites in weather prediction models to better anticipate extreme fire weather phenomena. Satellite data shows fire-produced thunderstorms are much more common than anyone realized just a few years ago. Here's what's happening.

The wildfire and weather connections

Imagine a wildland landscape with dry grasses, brush and trees. A spark lands, perhaps from lightning or a tree branch hitting a power line. If the weather is hot, dry and windy, that spark could quickly ignite a wildfire.

When vegetation burns, large amounts of heat are released. This heats the air near the ground, and that air rises like a hot air balloon because hot air is less dense than cool air. Cooler air then rushes in to fill the void left by rising air.

This is how wildfires create their own wind patterns.

What happens next depends on the stability of the atmosphere. If the temperature cools rapidly with elevation above the ground, then the rising air will always be warmer than its surroundings and it will keep rising. If it rises high enough, the moisture will condense, forming a cloud known as a pyrocumulus or flammagenitus.

RELATED: Earth's weather is getting weirder. Here's why.

If the air keeps rising, at some point the condensed moisture will freeze.

Once a cloud has both liquid and frozen water particles, collisions among these particles can lead to electrical charge separation. If the charge buildup is large enough, an electrical discharge — better known as lightning — will occur to neutralize the charges.

Whether a fire-induced cloud will become a thunderstorm depends on three key ingredients: a source of lift, instability and moisture.

Dry lightning

Wildfire environments typically have limited moisture. When conditions in the lower atmosphere are dry, this can lead to what's known as dry lightning.

No one living in a wildfire-prone environment wants to see dry lightning. It occurs when a thunderstorm produces lightning, but the precipitation evaporates before reaching the ground. That means there is no rain to help put out any lightning-sparked fires.

Fire whirls

As air rises in the atmosphere, it may encounter different wind speeds and directions, a condition known as wind shear. This can cause the air to spin. The rising air can tilt the spin to vertical, resembling a tornado.

These fire whirls can have powerful winds that can spread flaming ash, sparking new areas of fire. They usually are not true tornadoes, however, because they aren't associated with rotating thunderstorms.

Decaying storms

Eventually, the thunderstorm triggered by the wildfire will begin to die, and what went up will come back down. The downdraft from the decaying thunderstorm can produce erratic winds on the ground, further spreading the fire in directions that can be hard to predict.

When fires create their own weather, their behavior can become more unpredictable and erratic, which only amplifies their threat to residents and firefighters battling the blaze. Anticipating changes to fire behavior is important to everyone's safety.

Satellites show fire-created weather isn't so rare

Meteorologists recognized the ability of fires to create thunderstorms in the late 1990s. But it wasn't until the launch of the GOES-R Series satellites in 2017 that scientists had the high-resolution images necessary to see that fire-induced weather is actually commonplace.

Today, these satellites can alert firefighters to a new blaze even before phone calls to 911. That's important, because there is an increasing trend in the number, size and frequency of wildfires across the United States.

Climate change and rising fire risks

Heat waves and drought risk have been increasing in North America, with rising global temperatures more frequently leaving dry landscapes and forests primed to burn. And climate model experiments indicate that human-caused climate change will continue to raise that risk.

As more people move into fire-risk areas in this warming climate, the risk of fires starting is also rising. With fires come cascading hazards that persist long after the fire is out, such as burn-scarred landscapes that are much more susceptible to landslides and debris flows that can affect water quality and ecosystems.

Communities can reduce their vulnerability to fire damage by building defensible spaces and firebreaks and making homes and property less vulnerable. Firefighters can also reduce the surrounding fuel loads with prescribed fire.

It's important to remember that fire is a natural part of the Earth system. As fire scientist Stephen J. Pyne writes, we as humans will have to reorient our relationship with fire so we can learn to live with fire.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Zaps of static electricity are commonplace in everyday life. But can static electricity give enough of a jolt to start a fire?

Static electricity is the result of an imbalance between negative and positive electrical charges in an object, according to the U.S. Library of Congress. These charges can amass on an object's surface until they find a way to discharge.

The most common cause of static electricity is a phenomenon known as triboelectricity, Pourya Shamsi, a power electronics engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, told Live Science. When two materials repeatedly touch and then separate, the surface of one material can steal electrons from the surface of the other. This is why rubbing socks on a carpet or running a plastic comb through hair can build up electric charge. In essence, negative electrons are leaving one object for the other. Then, when you touch something, like your cat or dog, you'll get a shock as the extra electrons rapidly leave.

In the case of rubbing a balloon on your shirt, the balloon receives a surplus of electrons, whose negative charge helps the balloon stick to the wall, which is now more positively charged than the balloon, according to the Library of Congress.

The most powerful display of static electricity on Earth is lightning, Shamsi said. Collisions between droplets of rain and ice crystals within clouds can lead huge amounts of static electricity to build up, according to the National Weather Service. Lightning discharges can pack "as much as 5 gigajoules of energy, which is enough to set multiple trees on fire in an instant," Shamsi said.

In comparison, the amount of static charge that might build up on a person is hundreds of billions of times less, reaching about 40 millijoules of energy, Shamsi said. That is about as much energy as a typical LED indicator light might use in one second, according to electronics design firm Cadence.

Related: What makes something fireproof?

However, "even this small amount of energy is sufficient to damage sensitive electronic devices or start a fire," Shamsi said.

Most human-involved static electricity fires start with flammable fuel vapors and gases, Shamsi said. Specifically, "the most common everyday situations for starting a fire would be at gas pumps," Mark Lambert, director of the West Virginia State Fire Training Academy, told Live Science.

Static electricity on a person can discharge as an electric spark — on a pump handle, for instance — that can set fire to flammable material. To prevent fires at gas stations, "touch metal or the car door with your bare hand" before you use the pump, Lambert said. "This will discharge static electricity on your body and will prevent possible fire."

Importantly, "once the gasoline is pumping, do not get back into your vehicle," Lambert said. "This can recharge your body with static electricity."

The liners of truck beds can build up static electricity as well. "You should always remove gas cans from the bed of a truck to fill them at a pump," Lambert noted.

In addition to gas stations, "in industrial settings, static electricity can set fire to fine dusts, including fine wood dust, aluminum dust, and even wheat flour," Shamsi said. Powders and other items moving around inside a facility can lead to a buildup of static electricity on surfaces that can then discharge onto the dust, making it burn. "An average person might not consider aluminum or the bread they are eating as combustible," Shamsi said. "But when both are turned into fine powder, both can combust due to a static electricity discharge."

All in all, "people working with combustible fuels, including hydrocarbons and fine dust, should discharge themselves prior to handling the fuel or entering those environments," Shamsi said.

The thick, acid-rich clouds of Venus continue to shroud the planet next door in mystery.

Scientists have long-debated whether intriguing light flashes recorded by previous Venus missions are evidence of lightning strikes on the planet. If those flashes really represent lightning, future missions to the windy planet need to be designed such that they are strong enough to survive the bolts, which are known to damage electronics here on Earth.

Moreover, lightning on Venus means Earth's cosmic neighbor would join the rare planetary club whose current members — Earth, Jupiter and Saturn — host lightning bolts in their clouds. Such flickers of light would also be unique on the world in that they'd exist despite Venus' clouds lacking water, a substance considered key in creating electrical charges. 

Related: Mirror-like exoplanet that 'shouldn't exist' is the shiniest world ever discovered

So, scientists are excited by the possibility of lightning on Venus — but the evidence so far has been circumstantial at best.

And now, a new study suggests lightning might be extremely rare on the planet. Instead, it offers the possibility that meteors burning up high in Venus' atmosphere are very likely responsible for the detected light flashes.

Assuming there'd be a similar number of meteors raining on Venus as seen on Earth, the team estimated the number of flashes these space rocks should cause. The researchers then compared that data to the flashes recorded in the planet's atmosphere by two surveys: The Mt. Bigelow Observatory in Arizona and Japan's Venus orbiter Akatsuki, which has been circling our planetary neighbor since 2015.

Results showed that space rocks burning up about 62 miles (100 km) from Venus' surface "may be responsible for most or even possibly all of the observed flashes," according to the study. "Lightning thus does not seem like a threat to missions that pass through or even linger within the clouds."

Data from previous Venus missions by the U.S., Europe and the former Soviet Union included signals that scientists have long interpreted as lightning strikes, and suspected they even occur more frequently than those that flash on Earth.

In the recent past, however, both the Saturn-bound Cassini and the sun-bound Parker Solar Probe "searched for but failed to find radio signals from lightning" on Venus, researchers wrote in the new study.

Studies like this are important for planning future missions to Venus, an effort that is widely considered long overdue, especially as the recent detection of a possible active volcano on the planet's surface shows the world may still be geologically active.

If lightning strikes are really a risk, probes that attempt to descend to the surface of Venus or those that will float for months in its thick atmosphere will need protection while gathering valuable data.

While there may still be lightning at the surface caused by volcanic eruptions, the new study finds that overall, it is not of significant concern to future missions.

Future probes that descend quickly through Venus' atmosphere are safe, researchers say. That includes NASA's DAVINCI (short for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging), which is scheduled to plunge through the planet's atmosphere in early 2030s.

For long-lived aerial platforms that hover in the planet's clouds for about 100 Earth days or more, the study finds that a lightning strike is more likely to occur if the probe is within 56 miles (90 km) from the surface.

"However, perhaps such a moderately distant strike would seem more exciting than dangerous," according to the new study.

This research is described in a paper published Aug. 25 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. 

This edited article is republished from Space.com under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An astronomer recently captured one of the most detailed-ever shots of a rare type of upward-shooting red lightning, known as a sprite, which briefly hovered in the air like a gigantic jellyfish during a thunderstorm over central Europe. 

Stanislav Kaniansky, an astronomer at the Banská Bystrica Observatory in Slovakia, snapped the sprite near his home in Látky, Slovakia, on Aug. 14, Spaceweather.com reported. The luminous, zig-zagging structure measured more than 31 miles (50 kilometers) across and lasted for just a few fractions of a second before disappearing.

Sprites, or stratospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification, are created when electrical discharges from lightning shoot upward, often in addition to their normal downward trajectory. These discharges create long strands of plasma, or ionized gas, in the ionosphere — the ionized part of Earth's atmosphere that starts at around 50 miles (80 km) above Earth's surface, according to NASA.

Sprites are very hard to photograph because they are fleeting and often obscured by thick clouds. But Kaniansky's orientation enabled him to get a great look at the phenomenon. "The thunderstorm was about 320 km [200 miles] away, giving me a good view of the atmosphere just above the cloud tops," he told Spaceweather.com. 

The image is "one of the most detailed pictures ever of a sprite," according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey

Sprites were officially discovered in the early 1990s when NASA's space shuttles captured the first clear images of the phenomenon. But the red lightning has proved hard to study because it is so short-lived.

Scientists now believe that sprites may be partly triggered by disturbances in atmospheric plasma caused by tiny objects like meteors, but the exact mechanism behind the phenomenon is still unclear.

On Aug. 20, sprites were also photographed above lightning strikes from Hurricane Franklin as it passed Puerto Rico. 

Sprites are part of a group of phenomena known as transient luminous events (TLE) that are all tied to lightning. Other TLEs include blue jets, which are more powerful and energetic versions of sprites, and elves, or emission of light and very low-frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources, which are fleeting rings of red light created when electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) from lightning hit the ionosphere.

Other TLEs are also very rare but are becoming easier to photograph thanks to advancements in technology. In 2019, instruments aboard the International Space Station captured images of a gigantic blue jet from space. The phenomenon was also seen alongside a 2018 lightning bolt in Oklahoma, which is suspected of being the most powerful of its kind ever recorded. And in April this year, a photographer in Italy captured an eerie photo of a ring-shaped elve, which appeared to hang above a town like a UFO.

On Aug. 20, Puerto Rico-based photographer Frankie Lucena was taking pictures of a passing storm system that would soon evolve into the ongoing Hurricane Franklin, when a rare phenomenon of nature flashed before his eyes: several enormous bolts of lightning, blasting straight upward out of a storm cloud and stopping just below the edge of space.

Upward-moving lightning bolts like these are known as gigantic jets. They are the rarest and most powerful type of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and packing more than 50 times the power of a typical lightning bolt. The upside-down bolts can climb more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface, touching the bottom of the ionosphere, the vast layer of electrically charged particles where the top of the atmosphere meets the bottom of outer space. (Space technically begins at 62 miles, or 100 km, above sea level, while the ionosphere stretches from roughly 50 to 400 miles, or 80 to 640 km, above sea level.)

While rare, gigantic jets are not an unfamiliar sight during Atlantic hurricane season, gigantic jets are reported most frequently in tropical regions, especially during rapidly intensifying tropical storms like Franklin, according to an August 2022 study in the journal Science Advances.

Related: 'Gigantic jet' that shot into space may be the most powerful lightning bolt ever detected

Still, scientists have known about the phenomenon for only about 20 years, and much about it remains a mystery, including why the bolts shoot upward into the sky rather than slashing down to the ground. The gargantuan upward-flying bolts may be the result of some kind of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of the cloud, the authors of the 2022 study wrote, but the exact mechanism is still unknown.

There may be more chances to observe and study the bolts this year, as Atlantic hurricane season has just begun in full force. Franklin has since moved north toward Bermuda, intensifying into the first major hurricane of the 2023 season, according to the National Weather Service. While experts warn of potentially life-threatening rip currents along the East Coast of the United States, Hurricane Franklin is not currently forecast to make landfall.

On Aug. 30, Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida as a Category 2 storm, resulting in at least two confirmed deaths. The storm is being fueled by off-the-charts ocean temperatures, which have broken every record since satellite measurements began in the 1980s. The record-high temperatures have resulted from a combination of human-caused climate change and an El Niño event, which is forecast to substantially exceed the last strong event in early 2016.

A few weeks into his new job as a forensic pathologist, Ryan Blumenthal got a call to examine a dead body that had been found in a field. The deceased person's clothing was torn and her eardrums had burst. "It looked quite the disturbing scene," said Blumenthal, who now works at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. 

The culprit, however, was not a serial killer, but lightning. This electrically charged phenomena can send millions of volts of electricity through the body, and its destructive power sent Blumenthal down the path of becoming one of the world's top lightning pathologists. But what, exactly, happens when lightning strikes a person? And what happens if that person survives?

Most people who die from lightning strikes are killed instantly by cardiac arrest, as the bolt's massive electrical voltage short-circuits the heart's natural rhythm. Humans hit by lightning may also have their eardrums blown out by the incoming pressure wave, their respiratory system paralyzed, or suffer secondary burns as their hair or clothing catches fire. 

But lightning doesn't kill all of its victims; around 90% of people struck survive. A lightning bolt can pass through your body within mere fractions of a second — often, not even enough time to leave a mark. 

However, people who survive are usually left with nerve damage, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and neurologic symptoms "similar to the post-concussive injuries that football players get," such as impaired judgment and difficulty concentrating, Dr. Mary Ann Cooper, a lightning safety specialist at the National Lightning Safety Council and emerita professor of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Live Science. It is unclear exactly how these brain injuries occur, Cooper said, given the low number of lightning strikes and relative lack of funding for research. However, experts think that they are probably caused by some combination of tissue disruption from the current and blunt force trauma from the abrupt barometric pressure change.

Related: Why does lightning zigzag?

These conditions can be severe and even debilitating; some survivors report memory loss, chronic nerve pain, depression and even what they perceive as "psychic abilities" such as precognition, according to the National Weather Service. "Once you get struck by lightning, you're not the same person," Blumenthal told Live Science. 

Some survivors report fernlike "Lichtenberg figures" on their skin, which are thought to arise from damaged blood vessels leaking fluid into the surrounding tissue. In a 2020 case report from The New England Journal of Medicine, a 54-year-old man struck by lightning was described as initially stuporous, with numbness over parts of his body and Lichtenberg figures on his left arm and thigh, back and buttocks. However, the figures were painless, he reported, and were gone two days later when he returned to the doctor.

The world record for most lightning injuries is Roy Sullivan, a park ranger for Shenandoah National Park. Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was struck by lightning seven separate times. Though he sustained burns from his hair and clothes catching fire, he survived all seven strikes. He died by taking his own life in 1983 at the age of 72. 

Suicidal thoughts are another symptom experienced by some lightning survivors, who can experience severe pain and recovery problems following the event, Steve Mashburn, whose back was broken in a 1969 lightning stroke, told The Washington Post. Mashburn runs an international support group for lightning survivors.

Fortunately, lightning injuries are among the most preventable in the developed world. If you find yourself outside during a thunderstorm, simply "run like hell to a safe space," Cooper said. "And don't come out until there's been no lightning and no thunder for 30 minutes."

Blumenthal cautioned that only between 3% and 5% of  lightning strikes are direct hits. Contact injuries, which occur when a person is touching an object — such as a tree or building — when it is hit with a lightning bolt, account for another 5% of lightning injuries. The most common lightning injuries are from side flashes and ground current, which together cover more than 80% of lightning trauma. In a side flash, the victim is standing near an object when it gets struck by lightning, causing some of the electric potential to "splash" over onto the bystander. Ground current is similar, except it happens when lightning strikes the ground beneath the victim's feet. These incidents can harm multiple bodies at once. "This is why whole herds of animals get wiped out by lightning," Blumenthal told Live Science.

Related: What's the longest lightning bolt ever recorded?

The final 10% to 12% of lightning injuries are caused by the odd phenomenon of upward streamers, when positively charged electrical forces on the ground become attracted to negatively charged storm clouds overhead. As the positive charge builds up, it sends a "tendril" of charged air into the sky, which an electric shock travels down. 

Today, lightning deaths are relatively rare in the United States, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Cooper and her fellow members of the National Lightning Safety Council. Since 2001, the Council has held an annual Lightning Safety Awareness week to draw attention to the dangers of lightning strikes. When the initiative began, the U.S. saw around 55 lightning deaths on average per year. In 2022, that number had dropped to 19, according to the Insurance Information Institute. 

Now, Cooper and Blumenthal hope to bring a similar level of awareness, as well as resources such as lightning rods, to Africa. Cooper's new initiative, the African Centers for Lightning and Electromagnetics Network (ACLENet) is focused on reducing lightning deaths for both people and livestock across the continent. This mission is especially important given the accelerating pace of climate change, which results in more frequent and severe storms. 

"We're going to see more extreme weather over shorter time periods," Blumenthal says. "So we have to take this deadly seriously."

Stunning first videos from a new space-borne instrument designed to improve the monitoring of thunderstorms show the crackle of lightning over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.

The images were taken by the Meteosat-12 satellite operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) from geostationary orbit, some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. This altitude is extremely important for weather forecasters, as the speed of satellites circling the planet in this region matches  Earth's rotation. As a result, the satellites in this orbit have a constant view of a part of the globe, allowing meteorologists to observe how weather phenomena evolve in real time. 

Satellites of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have used lightning imagers before, but Meteosat-12 is the first to provide this type of information to European weather forecasters.

Related: 10 devastating signs of climate change satellites can see from space

The satellite, the first in the new Meteosat Third Generation family of Europe's weather observers, launched in December 2022 and will help the continent's meteorologists improve their forecasts of extreme weather events. 

"Severe storms are often preceded by abrupt changes in lightning activity," Eumetsat Director General Phil Evans said in a statement. "By observing these changes in activity, Lightning Imager data will give weather forecasters additional confidence in their forecasts of severe storms."

As climate change progresses and Earth's climate warms, severe thunderstorms, accompanied by torrential rains, hail and powerful winds, are set to become more common in Europe and around the world. By being able to better forecast these events, meteorologists hope to protect vulnerable populations in affected areas by disseminating earlier and more accurate warnings.

"Lightning is a strong indication that severe weather is occurring," Evans added in a briefing. "Where there is the most severe rainfall, there is often lightning."

Eumetsat-12's' Lightning Imager instrument consists of four cameras, which can detect the atmospheric flashes all over Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America. The data will be available to weather forecasters in Africa, as well as airliners on trans-Atlantic flights to improve safety.

"The Lightning Imager has four cameras, and each one can capture 1,000 images per second, day and night, detecting even a single lightning bolt faster than the blink of an eye," Guia Pastorini, a project engineering manager at aerospace company Leonardo, which built the instrument, said in the same statement. "Thanks to specific algorithms, data is processed on board to send only useful information to Earth, supporting the development of more accurate weather forecasts, as well as contributing to the study of weather phenomena and air transport safety."

For Europe, which is warming twice as fast as other continents, according to the European environment-monitoring agency Copernicus, having timely and accurate information about approaching disasters will save lives and reduce destruction.

For example, in the summer of 2021, floods triggered by heavy rainfall killed nearly 200 people in Germany in what was described as the nation's worst natural disaster in 60 years.

"In a world where climate change is increasing the intensity of severe weather events, instruments like [Lightning Imager] will become more and more important," Evans added in the briefing.  

Eumetsat-12 is the first in a family of six new weather satellites that will bolster Europe's defenses against climate change-induced weather disasters. The second satellite in the constellation will follow its sibling into orbit next year on Europe's new Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket, which is expected to make its debut flight later this year.

Originally posted on Space.com.

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga erupted in 2022, it generated the most intense lightning ever recorded, a new study finds. 

Located off the coast of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific, the submarine volcano produced one of the most violent eruptions in history, with more explosive force than 100 simultaneous Hiroshima bombs, according to NASA. The volcano spewed magma that immediately vaporized the seawater, sending a mushroom cloud of ash, gas and more than 50 million tons (45 million metric tons) of water vapor into the sky. 

According to the new study, published Tuesday (June 20) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, these conditions produced electrically charged collisions between ash, supercooled water and hailstones in the plume and triggered "a supercharged thunderstorm, the likes of which we've never seen," study lead author Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), said in a statement. The storm generated more than 192,000 lightning flashes — composed of nearly 500,000 electrical pulses — and peaked at 2,615 flashes per minute. Some of the lightning reached altitudes of up to 19 miles (30 kilometers) above sea level, the highest lightning flashes ever measured, the researchers said.

Related: Tonga's massive volcanic eruption wiped out unique, never-before-seen life-forms

"With this eruption, we discovered that volcanic plumes can create the conditions for lightning far beyond the realm of meteorological thunderstorms we've previously observed," Van Eaton said. "It turns out, volcanic eruptions can create more extreme lightning than any other kind of storm on Earth." That includes lightning from supercell storms and tropical cyclones, according to the study.

For their analysis, the scientists compiled data from four sources, including the satellite-based Geostationary Lightning Mapper, a NASA tool that tracks lightning from space. When the volcanic plume mushroomed outward after reaching its maximum height, in a pattern known as a gravity wave, some of the lightning followed suit, rippling out around the volcano in concentric rings that expanded and contracted, the study found. 

"It wasn't just the lightning intensity that drew us in," Van Eaton said. "The scale of these lightning rings blew our minds. We've never seen anything like that before; there's nothing comparable in meteorological storms. Single lightning rings have been observed, but not multiples, and they're tiny by comparison."

The data also revealed that the plumes created by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption grew for at least 11 hours — much longer than original projections of only an hour or two, the researchers said. This method of tracking lightning intensity alongside eruptive activity could enable scientists to better monitor the duration of volcanic eruptions and thus warn people about eruption-related risks.

"These findings demonstrate a new tool we have to monitor volcanoes at the speed of light and help the USGS's role to inform ash hazard advisories to aircraft," Van Eaton said.

A photographer has captured a striking time-lapse photo of more than 100 individual lightning bolts during a fierce thunderstorm in Turkey.

Astrophotographer Uğur İkizler created the electrifying image by combining shots of the sky near his home in the coastal town of Mudanya. The individual images were collected over a 50-minute period around midnight on June 16 — meaning that, on average, there was a lightning strike every 30 seconds.

"Each and every one of them is beautiful, but when I combined all the lightning bolts into a single frame, it was a frightening sight," İkizler told Live Science in an email. The thunderstorm was a "magnificent visual feast," he added.

At least three different types of lightning are visible in the image — cloud-to-cloud, where the bolt begins and ends in the clouds; cloud-to-ground, where the bolt hits the ground; and cloud-to-water, where the bolts hit the water instead of land, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: What's the longest lightning bolt ever recorded?

It is not uncommon for there to be so many lightning strikes during a single thunderstorm. Globally, there are 1.4 billion lightning strikes every year, or around 3 million every day. That works out as 44 lightning bolts every second, according to the U.K. Met Office.

Each individual bolt likely has a voltage somewhere between 100 million and 1 billion volts, as well as billions of amps in current. This much energy can raise the temperature of the surrounding air by between 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (10,000 degrees Celsius) and 60,000 F (33,000 C), according to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA). (For context, the sun's surface only reaches 10,000 F (5,500 C), according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.)

The new image shows off the iconic zigzag shape of lightning bolts. Researchers are not exactly sure what causes these crooked shapes, but a 2022 study suggested that the characteristic patterns are caused by a highly conductive form of oxygen that builds up irregularly as the bolt travels toward the ground.

An enormous, circular halo of eerie red light, which looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, recently flashed in the night sky above Italy. The bizarre disk appeared and disappeared within milliseconds, meaning most people likely missed the strange spectacle.

But one person, nature photographer Valter Binotto, managed to capture a shot of the luminous halo in the sky above the town of Possagno in northern Italy on March 27. However, the red ring was not actually located above the town. Instead, the massive circle, which was around 224 miles (360 kilometers) in diameter, blinked above central Italy and part of the Adriatic Sea. It was only a forced perspective that made the ring look as if it were hanging above the town.

The ring flash is known as an "emission of light and very low-frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources," or ELVE for short, according to Spaceweather.com. ELVEs are a rare type of stratospheric/mesospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification (SPRITE). The red rings are created when electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) given off by lightning hit Earth's ionosphere, the ionized part of the upper atmosphere that stretches between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 644 km) above the ground.

Related: Bright green laser lines shoot across night sky in Hawaii. What caused them? 

Due to their short-lived nature, ELVEs are normally visible only to satellites orbiting Earth and were discovered just in 1990 thanks to cameras onboard NASA's space shuttles. Binotto's new image is likely "the best ever picture of one from the ground," according to Spaceweather.com.

Binotto believes that the ELVE was produced by an EMP generated from a large thunderstorm near Ancona, a city around 174 miles (280 km) southeast of Possagno. Normally, lightning bolts do not emit EMPs because they do not carry enough current. But during this storm, an unusually powerful bolt, at least 10 times more powerful than regular lightning bolts, likely generated the electrical shockwave, which then hit the ionosphere, according to Spaceweather.com. When electrons from within the EMP hit the ionosphere, the charged particles excite nitrogen atoms which then give off the reddish glow. 

Binotto has photographed hundreds of ELVEs and other types of transient luminous events (TLEs) since he began shooting them in 2019, and this is "one of the biggest structures" he has ever seen, he told Spaceweather.com.

This is not the first time SPRITEs like this have been photographed from Earth. In February 2021, a red sprite in Hawaii was photographed alongside blue jets, which are lightning bolts that shoot upward instead of downward. And in April 2013, red sprites were photographed above multiple bolts of lightning in Nebraska.

For the first time ever, scientists have used lasers to redirect lightning toward a safe target.

The experiment, which took place atop Säntis mountain on the northern edge of the Swiss Alps, is the first real-world demonstration that intense bursts of light can be used to fish for lightning from storms, and redirect it to a safe location. 

Scientists have previously used lasers to bend the path of electricity in the lab, but achieving this outside is challenging. After hauling their laser to Säntis' summit at an altitude of 8,200 feet (2,500 meters), the researchers fixed it to a 407-foot-tall (124 m) transmission tower there and pointed it at the sky. Then, by firing the infrared laser at passing storm clouds in short blasts of roughly 1,000 times per second, they corralled a path for lightning to hit the tower four times in six hours. The researchers published their findings Jan 16. in the journal Nature Photonics.

Related: Why does lightning zigzag?

"Although this research field has been very active for more than 20 years, this is the first field-result that experimentally demonstrates lightning guided by lasers," the researchers wrote in the study. "This work paves the way for new atmospheric applications of ultrashort lasers and represents an important step forward in the development of a laser based lightning protection for airports, launchpads or large infrastructures."

Lightning emerges when atmospheric static electricity, generated by the friction of ice clumps and rain in stormclouds, separates electrons from atoms. The negatively charged electrons then pool at the stormcloud's base and attract positive charges from the ground. As electrons steadily accumulate, they begin to overcome the resistance of the air to their flow, ionizing the atmosphere below them as they approach the ground in multiple forking (and invisible) "leader" paths. When the first leader path makes contact with the ground, electrons hop to the earth from the point of contact, discharging from the bottom up in a flash of lightning (called the return stroke) that travels to the top of the cloud.

Lightning rods shield buildings by providing leader paths with a quick and safe route to discharge electrons into the ground, but the area they protect is limited by the rod's height. To get around this limitation, the scientists beamed their powerful laser bursts at the air near the rod, tearing electrons from air molecules and sweeping those molecules away to create an electron trail between a nearby stormcloud and the rod for the lightning to travel along.

Sure enough, four strikes hit the rod during the six hours of the laser's operation, easily surpassing the usual frequency of strikes on the rod of roughly 100 times per year. Even more direct evidence of the experiment’s success came from one of the strikes that was captured by cameras in slow motion as it zig-zagged onto the path cleared by the rod.

The scientists now want to replicate the effect in other locations with different atmospheric conditions, rods, lasers and pulses to see if this approach could be deployed more widely, and if lightning might strike twice.

Lightning can light up the sky in a bright flash and take on a variety of shapes, but if you were to draw it, you'd almost certainly scratch out a zigzag. But what gives thunderbolts this branch-like shape? Why does lightning zigzag across the sky, instead of discharging in a straight line between a thundercloud and the ground? 

Many of the mechanisms of lightning remain a mystery, although researchers are starting to untangle the reason behind lightning's crookedness. "We know all about most things on Earth — scientists can predict [lunar and solar] eclipses to within a fraction of a second," John Lowke, a physicist at the University of South Australia and lead author of a study investigating lightning's "stepped pattern," told Live Science. "But there are still big mysteries about common old lightning."

In the study, study published in December 2022 in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Lowke and colleagues suggest that the characteristic zigzag pattern of lightning is caused by a highly conducting form of oxygen that builds up irregularly as the bolt travels toward the ground, sometimes over great distances.

Related: What's the longest lightning bolt ever recorded?

Extremely fast photographs of lightning show that a lightning bolt is preceded by "leaders" of ionized (electrically charged) air that branch out from the bottom of a thundercloud, he said. In most cases, these leaders are too faint to be seen with the naked eye.

It's these leaders, not the final lightning bolt, that form the stepped pattern, Lowke said. 

Air usually acts as an insulator, but the leaders create regions with high concentrations of a special form of highly conducting oxygen called "singlet delta oxygen" — that is, oxygen molecules with a lower-than-normal energy state.

Each "zig" (or "zag") of a leader — a "step" which is about 165 feet (50 meters) long — is caused by electric charge discharging across such a region, Lowke said.

The powerful magnetic fields from the last step almost instantaneously create additional singlet delta oxygen molecules from the regular oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, and concentrations of this highly conductive oxygen can branch out in all directions from where the step ends, he explained.

The leader discharges across successive steps in about a millionth of a second, each followed by a fleeting "dark" period where the photographs show no visible discharge at all, and finally hits the ground or a tall object connected to it. That impact results in the visible (and very loud) "return stroke" of the lightning bolt for about one-thousandth of a second, traveling back along the zigzag path of the highly conducting singlet delta oxygen, he said. The other leaders lose their charge at this point and disappear. 

A better understanding of how lightning works can help structures and people survive thunderstorms, Lowke said. For example, it may inform the placement of lightning rods on tall objects such as buildings, radio masts and ship superstructures.

Among the lingering questions about lightning are what causes it. Although scientists now assume that lightning is static electricity created by the motion of ice particles in thunderclouds, that isn't known for sure, Lowke said.

"It's an amazingly interesting subject," he said. "The mysteries have not been recognized and are not known by the general public."

A tube of "fossilized lightning" from Nebraska's Sandhills holds a rare type of quasicrystal that had previously only been found in meteorites and at atomic bomb test sites. 

Quasicrystals are materials that break the traditional rules of crystallography. Before they were first reported in 1984, scientists thought materials could either be crystalline — with symmetrical, repeating patterns — or amorphous, meaning randomly arranged and disordered. In addition, scientists believed crystals could only be symmetrical a limited number of times when rotated around an axis — two, three, four or six times. 

Quasicrystals break those rules. They're put together in an ordered pattern, but that pattern does repeat. They also have rotational symmetries that no ordinary crystal can achieve. A quasicrystal with icosahedral symmetry, for example, can display five-fold symmetry around six different lines of rotation. 

Related: Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral 

Quasicrystals were first discovered in the laboratory. In 2012, however, Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, and Luca Bindi, a geoscientist at the University of Florence in Italy, announced the discovery of a natural quasicrystal in a meteorite that fell on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. The researchers then created more quasicrystals in the lab by mimicking the high temperatures and high pressures that might be found when rocky bodies collide. They then turned to another place where a very rapid transition to high temperature and high pressure occurred: the Trinity atomic bomb test site in New Mexico. There, they found more quasicrystals in minerals from beneath where the atomic bomb exploded. 

"For this reason, I started to think of other materials formed in similar conditions. And I thought of fulgurites, materials formed by lightning strikes," Bindi told Live Science in an email. 

Dramatic discharge 

Fulgurites form when lightning hits sand, fusing together the grains in a gnarly, branching tube of glass. Bindi collected multiple fulgurites in his search for quasicrystals. The one that held this rare form of matter came from the Sandhills of Nebraska, near the village of Hyannis. This area of Nebraska is made up of grass-covered sand dunes. 

The fulgurite was found near a power line that went down in a storm in 2008. In total, it was about 6.6 feet (2 meters) long and up to 3.1 inches (8 centimeters) in diameter. No one witnessed the event, so the researchers aren't sure whether lightning struck the power line and created the fulgurite, or whether the line went down in the wind and created the fulgurite with its own electrical discharge. 

Either way, the resulting branched glass contained a mixture of materials from the sand and the metals in the electrical line, including manganese, silicon, chromium, aluminum and nickel. To meld these materials, the temperature of the sand must have briefly reached at least 3,110 degrees Fahrenheit (1,710 degrees Celsius), the researchers reported Dec. 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Hunting for quasicrystals 

Using a scanning electron microscope, Bindi, Steinhardt and their colleagues found a 12-sided, 12-angled crystal with 12-fold symmetry embedded in the fulgurite. Quasicrystals with this sort of symmetry are even rarer than quasicrystals in general, the researchers wrote in their paper; quasicrystals with 10-fold symmetry or icosahedral symmetry are more common. 

The discovery points to new places to look for natural quasicrystals, Bindi said. 

"It demonstrates that transient extreme pressure-temperature conditions are suitable for the synthesis of quasicrystals," he said. Other potential places to find quasicrystals, he said, might be in impact glasses formed when large meteorites or asteroids hit Earth, or in parts of the moon's surface that have been hit by asteroids. 

Editor's note: Updated at 4 p.m. EST to clarify that the discovery of quasicrystals was first reported in a scientific publication in 1984. The discovery itself, made by National Institute of Standards and Technology scientist Dan Shechtman, occurred in 1982. 

When lightning flashes above, plants on the ground may respond in kind. 

Scientists have long been aware that plants and trees can emit small, visible electric discharges from the tips of their leaves when the plants are trapped beneath the electrical fields generated by thunderstorms high overhead. These discharges, known as coronas, are sometimes visible as faint, blue sparks that glow around charged objects. 

Now, new research suggests those plant-based sparks may be altering the surrounding air quality in ways never recognized before. But whether the impacts of these minishocks in the atmosphere are positive or negative remains unclear.

In the study, published Aug. 9 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, researchers recreated the electrical fields from thunderstorms in a laboratory and analyzed the coronas given off by eight plant species under a range of conditions. The results showed that all of the coronas created a high abundance of radicals — chemicals containing unpaired electrons that are highly reactive with other compounds — which can significantly alter the surrounding air quality. 

"While little is known about how widespread these discharges are, we estimate that coronas generated on trees under thunderstorms could have substantial impacts on the surrounding air," lead study author Jena Jenkins, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, said in a statement. 

Related: 'Gigantic jet' that shot into space may be the most powerful lightning bolt ever detected 

The two radicals given off by the plant coronas are hydroxyl (OH) and hydroperoxyl (HO2), both of which are negatively charged and are known to oxidize, or steal electrons from, a number of different chemical compounds, thereby transforming them into other molecules. The researchers were particularly interested in the concentrations of hydroxyl radicals because they have a greater impact on air quality.

"The hydroxyl radical contributes to the total atmospheric oxidation of many atmospheric pollutants," study co-author William Brune, a meteorologist at Penn State University, said in the statement. 

For example, if a hydroxyl radical reacts with greenhouse gases, such as methane, then it can remove the damaging molecules from the atmosphere and help combat climate change, Brune said. But if the same radical reacts with oxygen, it can create ozone, which, despite playing an important role in the upper atmosphere, is toxic to humans. The radicals can also create aerosol particles that harm air quality, he added. 

This is not the first time that researchers have shown the link between thunderstorms and hydroxyl radicals. 

In 2021, a research team led by Brune found that lightning was a major progenitor of hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere. In their paper, published in the journal Science, the team theorized that thunderstorms could be directly responsible for up to one-sixth of the hydroxyl radicals in the atmosphere.

In September, another team led by Brune released a follow-up study, published in the journal Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, that showed coronas produced by metallic objects such as telephone poles and transmission towers produce a slightly higher level of hydroxyl radicals than plant coronas. However, the levels of radicals produced by plant and artificial coronas are both significantly less than those produced directly from lightning. 

"Even though the charge generated by the [plant] corona was weaker than the sparks and lightning we looked at before, we still saw extreme amounts of this hydroxy radical being made," Jenkins said. 

Considering the vast numbers of trees that are present in lightning-prone areas, plant-produced coronas may represent a majorly understudied source of radicals with a highly unpredictable effect on air quality, she added.

"There are about two trillion trees in areas where thunderstorms are most likely to occur globally and there are 1,800 thunderstorms going on at any given time," Jenkins said.

As a result, researchers want to continue studying these coronas in greater detail to fully understand the effect they have on localized air quality and on a wider global scale. 

"The hydroxyl radical is the atmosphere's most important cleanser," Jenkins said. "So having a better accounting of where this stuff is being made can give us a more complete understanding of what's happening in the atmosphere."

Other studies suggest that thunderstorms may become more frequent and powerful due to the effects of human-caused climate change, so understanding the effects of thunderstorms on air quality is vital, she added. 

During the experiments, the team made another discovery that could help accelerate this field of research: The leafy discharges gave off sharp spikes of ultraviolet radiation. This could allow the team to indirectly study where coronas are occurring in the field and measure their effects on nearby air quality. 

An astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS) has snapped a peculiar image of Earth from space that contains two bizarre blue blobs of light glimmering in our planet's atmosphere. The dazzling pair may look otherworldly. But in reality, they are the result of two unrelated natural phenomena that just happened to occur at the same time.

The image was captured last year by an unnamed member of the Expedition 66 crew as the ISS passed over the South China Sea. The photo was released online Oct. 9 by NASA's Earth Observatory. 

The first blob of light, which is visible at the bottom of the image, is a massive lightning strike somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand. Lightning strikes are typically hard to see from the ISS, as they're usually covered by clouds. But this particular strike occurred next to a large, circular gap in the top of the clouds, which caused the lightning to illuminate the surrounding walls of the cloudy caldera-like structure, creating a striking luminous ring.   

Related: Upward-shooting 'blue jet' lightning spotted from International Space Station 

The second blue blob, which can be seen in the top right of the image, is the result of warped light from the moon. The orientation of Earth's natural satellite in relation to the ISS means the light it reflects back from the sun passes straight through the planet's atmosphere, which transforms it into a bright blue blob with a fuzzy halo. This effect is caused by some of the moonlight scattering off tiny particles in Earth's atmosphere, according to Earth Observatory.

Different colors of visible light have different wavelengths, which affects their interaction with atmospheric particles. Blue light has the shortest wavelength and is therefore the most likely to scatter, which caused the moon to turn blue in this image. The same effect also explains why the sky appears blue during the daytime: because blue wavelengths of sunlight scatter the most and become more visible to the human eye, according to NASA. 

Also visible in the photo is a glowing web of artificial lights coming from Thailand. The other prominent sources of light pollution in the image are emitted from Vietnam and Hainan Island, the southernmost region of China, though these light sources are largely obscured by clouds. The orange halo parallel to the curvature of the Earth is the edge of the atmosphere, which is commonly known as "Earth's limb" when viewed from space, according to Earth Observatory. 

The sky turns dark, a heavy rain falls and a bolt of lightning crackles through the air. But instead of striking down toward the ground, or zipping sideways between clouds, this lightning bolt does something unexpected: It blasts straight upward from the top of the cloud, shooting 50 miles (80 kilometers) into the sky, grazing the lower edge of space.

Bolts like these are called gigantic jets. They are the rarest and most powerful sort of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and emitting more than 50 times as much energy as a typical lightning bolt — and now, scientists have just detected the single most powerful gigantic jet yet.

In a study published Aug. 3 in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed a gigantic jet that shot out of a cloud over Oklahoma in 2018. By studying the jet's radio-wave emissions using satellite and radar data, the team learned that the bolt moved approximately 300 coulombs of energy from the top of the cloud to the lower ionosphere — the layer of charged particles that separates Earth's upper atmosphere from the vacuum of space — or roughly 60 times the 5-coulomb output of a typical lightning bolt.

"The charge transfer is nearly double the previous largest by a gigantic jet and is comparable to the largest ever recorded for cloud-to-ground strokes," the researchers wrote in the study.

Related: What's the longest lightning bolt ever recorded?

Capturing such detailed data on the massive stroke of lightning required an equally massive stroke of luck. A citizen scientist based in Hawley, Texas filmed the jet with a low-light camera on May 14, 2018, watching as the gargantuan discharge shot out of a cloud top before connecting with charged particles in the ionosphere, some 60 miles (96 km) above the ground.

Scientists analyzing the footage found that, as luck would have it, the jet occurred very near the center of a large lightning mapping array (LMA) — a network of ground-based radio antennas used to map the locations and times of lightning strikes. The jet was also within range of several weather radar systems, as well as a weather-watching satellite network.

With these sources combined, the researchers studied the size, shape and energy output of the gigantic jet in unprecedented detail. The researchers found that the jet's highest-frequency radio-wave emissions (the kind that LMAs are built to detect) came from small structures called streamers, which develop at the very tip of a lightning bolt and create a "direct electrical connection between the cloud top and the lower ionosphere," lead study author Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, said in a statement.

The strongest electric current, meanwhile, flowed considerably behind the streamers, in a section called the leader. The data also showed that while the streamers were relatively cool, with a temperature of roughly 400 degrees Fahrenheit (204 degrees Celsius), the leader was scorching hot, with a temperature of more than 8,000 degrees F (4,426 C). This discrepancy is true of all lightning strikes, not just gigantic jets, the researchers wrote.

So, why does lightning sometimes blast up instead of down? Scientists still aren't totally clear on that, but it likely involves some sort of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of a cloud; gigantic jets are typically observed in storms that don't produce many cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, the team added. 

"For whatever reason, there is usually a suppression of cloud-to-ground discharges," Boggs said. "In the absence of the lightning discharges we normally see, the gigantic jet may relieve the buildup of excess negative charge in the cloud."

Gigantic jets are also reported most frequently in tropical regions, the team noted. This makes the record-breaking jet over Oklahoma all the more remarkable; the jet was not part of a tropical storm system. More research — and a lot more luck — is needed to understand these epic, upside-down lightning strikes.

Originally published on Live Science.

Four lightning bolts struck the launch pad of the 'Mega Moon rocket' during tests on April 2 at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket, part of the Artemis I mission to deliver humans to the moon, is the world’s most powerful and stands at 322 feet (98 meters) tall.

Three of the strikes, which zapped tower two, were low intensity, NASA said in a statement. The fourth, a higher intensity bolt, struck tower one. At the time, the Orion spacecraft (where the crew will sit) and Space Launch System (the giant rocket) were powered up on Launch Pad 39B, during a so-called wet dress rehearsal. That dress rehearsal stopped on Sunday (April 3) due to an issue with two fans that are "needed to provide positive pressure to the enclosed areas within the mobile launcher and keep out hazardous gases," NASA said in another statement.

"Teams currently see no constraints to proceeding with the test countdown timeline as planned and will continue procedures to power up the SLS boosters and ICPS overnight," NASA said. Engineers and the mission management team were slated to decide whether to resume the testing Monday (April 4).

The wet dress rehearsal, which began April 1, involves a series of pre-launch tests in which teams load the rocket with liquid ("wet"), supercooled fuel, verify launch systems and "rehearse" different countdown scenarios before liftoff. 

Actual liftoff is still at least a month away, Live Science previously reported. The Artemis program, which will happen in three stages, aims to land the first woman and person of color on the moon no earlier than 2025, Space.com reported. Though Artemis I won't carry actual humans, two "female" torsos — dubbed "Zohar" and "Helga," by the Israel Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center, respectively — will take the ride to help scientists measure radiation levels. A life-size "male" manikin or "moonikin" will ride in the commander's seat, Live Science reported.

Originally published on Live Science.

"Thunder is impressive," Mark Twain wrote, "but it is lightning that does the work." Anyone who's watched a lightning storm will understand what he meant: Lightning is one of nature's most awe-inspiring phenomena, illuminating the skies with its fearsome forks. 

According to the U.K. Met Office, lightning strikes the planet up to 1.4 billion times a year, or an estimated 44 times every second. And it's more than just a light show: Lightning plays a critical role in keeping Earth's electrical balance in check; aids in fixing nitrogen, thereby helping plants grow; and potentially even helps to clear the atmosphere of pollutants.

But some lightning strikes work harder than others. While most lightning flashes measure 2 to 3 miles (3.2 to 4.8 kilometers) in length, some truly colossal bolts occasionally crackle above our heads, forking their way across hundreds of miles of sky. But how big can lightning actually get? And should we be worried about these gigantic bolts?

Related: Can diamonds burn?

How lightning is made

Lightning arises in storm clouds when strong positive charge develops in one region of the cloud and strong negative charge develops in another, creating electrical forces between them. 

"A lightning flash is initiated in a region where the electrical forces are extremely strong," said Don MacGorman, a physicist and senior researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma. "They become strong enough that the air can't withstand the electrical force anymore and breaks down."

That means that, as the electric force grows, it breaks down the air's insulating power, which usually keeps areas of different charge separated from each other. Researchers think this occurs because the buildup of the excessive electrical force starts to accelerate "free" electrons — those not attached to an atom or a molecule — in the air, in turn knocking other electrons loose from their atoms and molecules, MacGorman said. This process continues, accelerating more and more electrons. "Scientists call this process an electron avalanche, and it's what we mean when we say the air breaks down," MacGorman told Live Science.

This eventually creates a very hot channel in the air that acts like a wire, whose ends grow outward toward the positive and negative charges that caused the breakdown. The growing channel eventually connects the positive and negative charges, and when it does, it triggers the immense electric current we know as a lightning flash.

"Think of it as a giant spark that has grown through the cloud," MacGorman said.

Sometimes, the lower region of a cloud, which usually contains positive charge, does not have enough charge on its own to stop the channel. So the lightning bolt continues growing, stretching downward toward the ground. As it does so, it draws an upward spark from the ground to meet it, triggering a lightning flash with huge electric currents that transport some of the storm's charge to the ground. These cloud-to-ground channels are what most of us commonly picture when we think of lightning — those vivid forks that strike Earth.

The cloud's the limit

But what factors limit the size of these massive bolts? Researchers have been trying to answer this question for decades. Vertically, the extent of a flash is limited by the height of a storm cloud, or the distance from the ground to its pinnacle, which is about 12 miles (20 km) at its highest. 

But horizontally, an extensive cloud system provides much more room to play with. This is where the heavyweights work their magic. 

Related: Why do deserts get so cold at night?

Back in 1956, Myron Ligda, a meteorologist in Texas, used radar to detect a flash spanning more than 100 miles (160 km). At the time, it was recognised as the longest lightning flash ever recorded. Since then, advancements in technology have allowed researchers to measure much larger flashes, and more of them.  

In 2007, researchers identified a bolt over Oklahoma that measured 200 miles (322 km) long. But only a decade later, that record was obliterated: In October 2017, clouds above the Midwest released a flash of lightning so huge that it illuminated the skies above Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Spanning more than 310 miles (500 km) across the three states, the jolt was so unprecedented that a group of researchers published a study about it in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, describing it as a "megaflash." It was one of the largest lightning flashes ever recorded. 

But even that flash has been surpassed. Auspiciously, on Halloween 2018, a lightning bolt over Brazil was later revealed to have spanned more than 440 miles (709 km). Keeping meteorologists on their toes, the skies broke that record by releasing another behemoth on April 29, 2020 — a megaflash that stretched from Texas to Mississippi, covering 477 miles (768 km).

More recently, satellite analysis of a 2017 storm revealed that an even bigger bolt traversed five U.S. states in just seven seconds to set the current record of 515 miles (829 kilometers).

While lightning has traditionally been observed from ground-based systems such as antennae and radar, many of these record-breaking flashes are now recorded using satellites. One of these, called the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, made up of sensors on two satellites orbiting Earth, helped reveal the enormous extent of the lightning flash in October 2017, said MacGorman, who is an author of a study about this former record-breaking flash. "That system responds to the light emitted from a cloud top, so we see the light from the lightning flashes and can then map it, pretty much all over this hemisphere," MacGorman said.

The making of giants

But even with these exciting visual insights, researchers still aren't sure about the precise mechanics that underpin such lengthy electrical illuminations. Cloud size is almost certainly a factor; also required, MacGorman said, are certain "mesoscale processes — large scale wind flows that enable that system to be tied together to persist for a long time."

With the stage set by these monster clouds, what's actually happening within them? "These megaflashes appear to be like a continuous sequence of discharges in very close succession," said Christopher Emersic, a research fellow who studies thunderstorm electrification at the University of Manchester in the U.K. 

Related: What's the coldest place in the universe?

He hypothesizes that if a cloud system is highly charged across a large area, a series of discharges can propagate through it like a line of falling dominoes. "If dominoes are all set up without too big a gap, one triggers another in a large series of topples," Emersic told Live Science. "Otherwise, it 'fails,' and in this case, you'll get only a smaller spatial lightning event rather than a megaflash." 

The larger the parent cloud, the more opportunity there is for the discharge to continue propagating — "hence why megaflashes could, in principle, be as large as the parent cloud, should the charge structure be conducive," Emersic said.

That also means there are likely much bigger flashes out there than we've already seen. "Storms can get larger than [the ones we've measured from]," MacGorman said. 

Paired with more sophisticated detection tools, this makes it likely that lightning hunters will go on to find even larger bolts that break current records and increase our awareness of these immense natural feats.

Cause for concern?

Despite the apocalyptic picture they paint, megaflashes aren't necessarily more dangerous than regular lightning. "A spatially extensive flash doesn't necessarily mean it carries more energy," Emersic said. 

Because the cloud systems from which they originate are so vast, however, megaflash strikes can be difficult to predict. "Such events can often lead to ground strikes far away from the main lightning activity in the convective core," Emersic said. "Someone on the ground could think the storm has passed but be caught by surprise by one of these spatially extensive discharges seemingly from nowhere." 

It's also possible that in a warming world, there might be an uptick in the types of storms that give rise to megaflashes, Emersic said. "And so, indirectly, that can make the conditions more likely, thereby increasing their frequency."

For now, though, megaflashes aren't that common; MacGorman estimates that they make up only about 1% of lightning flashes overall. Nevertheless, researchers like him will go on hunting — and, no doubt, discovering — even bigger behemoths for us to marvel at.

Editor's note: Originally published on Live Science on Dec. 14, 2019, and updated on April 4, 2022 and July 31, 2025 to include new record-breaking lightning strikes.

Tomorrow's weather may be cloudy with a chance of electrons, thanks to a newly detected phenomenon in Earth's magnetic shield.

Described as unexpected, ultra-fast "electron precipitation," the phenomenon occurs when waves of electromagnetic energy pulse through Earth's magnetosphere – the magnetic field generated by the churning of Earth's core, which surrounds our planet and shields it from deadly solar radiation. These electrons then overflow from the magnetosphere and plummet toward Earth. 

The torrential electron rains are more likely to occur during solar storms, and they may contribute to the aurora borealis, according to research published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications. However, the researchers added, electron rains may also pose a threat to astronauts and spacecraft in ways that space radiation models don't currently account for.

"Although space is commonly thought to be separate from our upper atmosphere, the two are inextricably linked," study co-author Vassilis Angelopoulos, a professor of space physics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) said in a statement. "Understanding how they're linked can benefit satellites and astronauts passing through the region." 

Scientists have known for decades that energetic particles periodically rain down on our planet in small quantities. These particles originate in the sun and sail across the 93 million-mile-wide (150 million kilometers) gap to Earth on the back of solar wind. Our planet's magnetosphere traps many of these particles in one of two giant, donut-shaped belts of radiation known as the Van Allen belts. Occasionally, waves generated within these belts cause electrons to speed up and tumble into Earth's atmosphere.

The new study shows that electron downpours can occur far more often than previous research thought possible.

In their new research, the study authors analyzed electron showers in the Van Allen belts using data from two satellites: the Electron Losses and Fields Investigation (ELFIN) spacecraft, a satellite about the size of a bread loaf that orbits low in Earth's atmosphere; and the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft, which orbits Earth beyond the Van Allen belts.

Monitoring electron fluxes in the Van Allen belts from above and below, the team was able to detect electron rain events in great detail. The THEMIS data showed that these electron downpours were caused by whistler waves — a type of low-frequency radio wave that originates during lightning strikes and then surges through Earth's magnetosphere.

These energetic waves can accelerate electrons in the Van Allen belts, causing them to spill over and rain down on the lower atmosphere, the researchers found. Additionally, the ELFIN satellite data showed that these rains can occur far more often than previous research suggested, and they can become especially prevalent during solar storms.

Current space weather models account for some sources of electron precipitation into Earth's atmosphere (such as impacts from solar wind, for example) — however, they do not account for whistler-wave-induced electron showers, according to the researchers. High-energy charged particles can damage satellites and pose hazards to astronauts caught in their path. By further understanding this source of electron rain, scientists can update their models to better protect the people and machines that spend their time high above our planet, the new study authors said.

Originally published on Live Science.

An underwater volcano in the South Pacific erupted last month and shattered two records simultaneously: The volcanic plume reached greater heights than any eruption ever captured in the satellite record, and the eruption generated an unparalleled number of lightning strikes — almost 590,000 over the course of three days, Reuters reported.

"The combination of volcanic heat and the amount of superheated moisture from the ocean made this eruption unprecedented. It was like hyper-fuel for a mega-thunderstorm," Kristopher Bedka, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center who specializes in studying extreme storms, said in a statement from the NASA Earth Observatory. "The plume went 2.5 times higher than any thunderstorm we have ever observed, and the eruption generated an incredible amount of lightning."  

The volcano, called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, lies about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa and sits within the so-called Tonga-Kermadec volcanic arc, a line of mostly underwater volcanoes that runs along the western edge of the Pacific Plate of Earth's crust, Nature magazine reported. 

Related: Elves, sprites & blue jets: Earth's weirdest lightning 

The eruption began on Jan. 13, launching  explosions that broke the water's surface and generating a major lightning event, according to Reuters. Then, on Jan. 15, rising magma from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai met the seawater above the volcano, triggering a sudden and massive blast. Such explosive eruptions can occur when magma rapidly heats water into steam, which then quickly expands; bubbles of volcanic gas caught within the magma also help to drive these dramatic blasts up and out of the water, Nature reported.

Underwater volcanic eruptions don't typically release large plumes of gas and particles into the air, but the Jan. 15 eruption was an exception to this rule, Nature reported.

Two weather satellites — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's  Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 17 (GOES-17) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Himawari-8 — captured the unusual eruption from above, allowing scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center to calculate just how far the plume penetrated the atmosphere. 

"From the two angles of the satellites, we were able to recreate a three-dimensional picture of the clouds," Konstantin Khlopenkov, a scientist on the NASA Langley team, said in the statement. 

They determined that, at its highest point, the plume rose 36 miles (58 km) into the air, meaning it pierced the mesosphere — the third layer of the atmosphere — according to the NASA statement. After an initial blast generated this towering plume, a secondary blast from the volcano sent ash, gas and steam more than 31 miles (50 km) into the air. 

Back in 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines unleashed a plume that extended 22 miles (35 km) above the volcano, and until the recent Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption, that 1991 event held the record for the largest known volcanic plume in the satellite record, the statement noted. 

When the highest portions of these plumes reached the mesosphere, they quickly transitioned into a gaseous state. But in the stratosphere below, gas and ash from the volcano accumulated and spread to cover an area of 60,000 square miles (157,000 square kilometers).

"As the eruption plume hit the stratosphere and spread outward, it appears to have created waves in the atmosphere," Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist at Vaisala, an environmental technology company, told Reuters. Vagasky and his colleagues are still studying the lightning activity generated by the eruption, and he's interested in how these atmospheric waves influenced the pattern of lightning strikes. 

To study the lightning, the team is using data from GLD360, a ground-based lightning detection network operated by Vaisala. These data revealed that, of the nearly 590,000 lightning strikes that took place during the eruption, about 400,000 occurred within six hours after the big blast on Jan. 15, Reuters reported.

Prior to the Tonga eruption, the largest volcanic lightning event in Vaisala's records happened in Indonesia in 2018, when Anak Krakatau erupted and generated about 340,000 lightning strikes over the course of a week. "To detect nearly 400,000 in just a few hours is extraordinary," Vagasky told Reuters. About 56% of the lightning struck the surface of the land or ocean, and more than 1,300 strikes landed on Tonga's main island of Tongatapu, the team determined.

The lightning came in two flavors. One type of lightning was caused by "dry charging," in which ash, rocks and lava particles repeatedly collide in the air and swap negatively charged electrons. The second type of lightning was caused by "ice charging," which occurs when the volcanic plume reaches heights where water can freeze and form ice particles that slam into each other, Reuters reported.

Both of these processes lead to lightning strikes by causing electrons to build up on the undersides of the clouds; these negatively charged particles then leap to higher, positively charged regions of the clouds or to positively charged regions of the ground or sea below.

"The percentage of lightning that was classified as cloud-to-ground was higher than you would normally see in a typical thunderstorm and higher than you typically see in volcanic eruptions, so that creates some interesting research questions," Vagasky told Reuters.

Originally published on Live Science. 

Two storms in 2020 set two new records for lightning, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced today (Feb. 1). 

One record was for longest single bolt, a record captured by a flash of lightning that stretched for about 477 miles (168 kilometers) from Texas to Mississippi during a storm on April 29, 2020. That's about the same distance between New York City and Columbus, Ohio. 

The second record was for longest-duration bolt, which went to a flash that lit up the sky for an impressive 17.1 seconds during a storm on June 18, 2020, over Uruguay and northern Argentina. 

The bolt that broke the record for length beat out the previous record-holder, a 440-mile-long (709 km) bolt that occurred during a storm in southern Brazil in 2018. The previous record-holder for duration also occurred in northern Argentina and lasted 16.73 seconds. It happened in March 2019. 

"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning detection technology improves," Randall Cerveny, a professor of geography at Arizona State University and rapporteur of Weather and Climate Extremes for WMO, said in a statement.

Lightning observation is changing as technology gets better. Previous records were detected by ground-based instruments known as lightning mapping arrays. But new satellite observers are allowing researchers a bird's-eye view of storms over huge distances. The two new record-breaking bolts were recorded on instruments aboard the GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites, which are operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Europe has a similar eye-in-the-sky, the Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager, and China has the FY-4 Lightning Mapping Imager. 

"Now that we have a robust record of these monster flashes, we can begin to understand how they occur and appreciate the disproportionate impact that they have," said Michael J. Peterson, an atmospheric scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the reporting of the new records, published Feb. 1 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

"There is still a lot that we do not know about these monsters," Peterson said in the statement.

Originally published on Live Science. 

On a dark, stormy summer night in 1752, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a key attached to the string waiting in anticipation for lightning to strike. The dramatic bolt would harken the discovery of electricity (or as Franklin called it "electrical fire") … or so the story goes.

But is there any truth to this tale? Did Franklin really discover electricity by getting zapped by a lightning bolt during this experiment?

Though most people know Benjamin Franklin — an American founding father, legendary statesman and the face of the U.S. $100 bill — for his political contributions, Franklin was well known in his time as a scientist and an inventor: a true polymath. He was a member of several scientific societies and was a founding member of the American Philosophical Society. As a result, he stayed informed on the most pressing scientific questions that occupied learned people of his time, one of which was the nature of lightning.

As for the kite-and-key experiment, most people are aware of the version in which the metal key acted as a lightning rod, and Franklin subsequently "discovered" electricity when lightning struck his kite. However, several details about this experiment are unknown, including when and where it happened. Some historians even doubt that it took place. 

Related: Did Benjamin Franklin really want the turkey to be the US national bird?

For starters, it's a common myth that Franklin discovered electricity. Electricity had already been discovered and used for centuries before Franklin's experiment. Franklin lived from 1709 to 1790, and during his time, electricity was understood as the interaction between two different fluids, which Franklin later referred to as "plus" and "minus." According to French chemist Charles François de Cisternay du Fay, materials that possessed the same type of fluid would repel, while opposite fluids attracted one another. We now understand that these "fluids" are electrical charges generated by atoms. Atoms are made up of negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus (made up of protons and neutrons).

It was unknown prior to Franklin's experiment whether lightning was electrical in nature, though some scientists, including Franklin, had speculated just that. Page Talbott, author and editor of "Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World" (Yale University Press, 2005) and the former president and CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said that Franklin was particularly interested in this question because lightning strikes had caused disastrous fires in cities and towns where houses were made of wood, which many homes in the U.S. were at the time.

"By attaching a key to the string of a kite, thus creating a conductor for the electrical charge, he was demonstrating that a pointed metal object placed at a high point on a building — connected to a conductor that would carry the electricity away from the building and into the ground — could make a huge difference to the long-term safety of the inhabitants," Talbott told Live Science in an email. In other words, by creating a lightning rod, Franklin was helping to protect wooden homes and buildings from being directly struck by lightning.

Lightning rods are metal rods placed at the top of structures, connected to the ground with a wire. If lightning strikes the building, it will likely strike the electrically conductive rod instead of the building itself and safely run through the wire to the ground.

Here's how the experiment worked; standing in a shed, Franklin flew a kite, made of a simple silk handkerchief stretched across a cross made of two cedar strips, during a lightning storm. The tail of the kite was made of two materials — the upper end attached to the kite was made of hemp string and attached to a small metal key, while the lower end, held by Franklin, was made of silk. The hemp would get soaked by the rain and conduct electrical charge, while the silk string would remain dry because it is held under cover.

As Franklin observed his flying kite, he saw that the hemp strands stood on end as they began to accumulate electrical charge from the ambient air. When he placed his finger near the metal key, he reportedly felt a sharp spark as the negative charges that had accumulated on the key were attracted to the positive charges in his hand. 

A few publications at the time reported on the experiment. "[Franklin] published a statement about the experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he published, on October 19, 1752," Talbott said. He then sent the text of this statement to a patron of the American Philosophical Society named Louis Collinson; Franklin had spent the last few years communicating his theories and proposing his experiments concerning lightning to him.

Franklin referred to the experiment in his autobiography, and other colleagues in Europe wrote about it as well, Talbott said. Notably, the experiment appeared in the 1767 book "History and Present Status of Electricity" by Joseph Priestley, an English chemist. Priestley heard about the kite-and-key experiment from Franklin himself around 15 years after the fact, and in his book, he wrote that it occurred during June 1752. However, exactly when the experiment came to Franklin and when he did it is a matter of debate.

There are some historians who doubt whether Franklin actually did the experiment himself, or merely outlined its possibility. In his book "Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax" (PublicAffairs, 2003), author Tom Tucker stated that Franklin wanted to thwart William Watson, a member of the Royal Society of London and a preeminent electrical experimenter. Watson had sabotaged the publication of some of Franklin's previous reports and had ridiculed his experiments in the Royal Society, Tucker wrote. Could Franklin have felt pressured to invent the kite story to get back at Watson?

Tucker also noted that Franklin's description of his experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette was phrased in the future conditional tense: "As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them..." Franklin could have simply been saying that the experiment could, in theory, be performed. Given that his statement has a few missing details — Franklin didn't list a date, time or location, for example — it's possible that the American diplomat did not perform the experiment himself.

However, some historians remain unconvinced that the experiment wasn't carried out, pointing to Franklin's great respect for scientific pursuits. Franklin experts, such as the late American critic and biographer Carl Van Doren, also point to the fact that Priestley specified the month in which Franklin performed his experiment, suggesting that Franklin must have given him precise details directly.

Originally published on Live Science.

The clouds are hanging low on the horizon; the air is sticky and sizzling with electricity. Suddenly, a silent bolt of lightning cracks open the sky. The boom follows a full four seconds later. 

Compared with light, which moves at a stunning 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), sound waves are downright sluggish, moving through air at 0.2 miles per second (0.3 km per second). That's why you see lightning before you hear the thunder. But what would happen if the speed of sound suddenly were a million times faster — the same as the speed of light?

Of course, thunder would reach you at the precise moment of lightning. But that bolt of lightning would also look pretty eerie. Sound waves are composed of particles, each moving slightly enough to collide into the next. That creates areas of higher and lower density within the wave, said George Gollin, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Just think of a slinky: as the toy moves, the coils continually bunch together and then spread out again. Sound waves are similar. At slow speeds, that change in density is imperceptible. At the speed of light, it's a different story. 

Related: What would happen if the speed of light were much lower?

"What would happen is you have pretty humid air [during a lightning storm], the sound wave comes through and squeezes stuff really hard, and then expands out and the pressure drops a lot," Gollin told Live Science. Because pressure corresponds to temperature, the sudden drop in air pressure after a clap of thunder would cause the humid air to freeze. You'd see the lightning bolt through a dense fog of ice crystals. 

An ultra-fast speed of sound would completely change the way our world sounds. Voices would sound particularly strange, Gollin said. When we speak, our vocal cords vibrate to produce sound waves of many different frequencies, pumping them into the larynx, or voice box. There, waves of the same frequency add together to produce much bigger waves — which translates to louder sound. However, not all frequencies add together in the same way. Some sync up perfectly, while others actually interfere with one another, producing a smaller wave and a quieter sound. If the sound moved faster in air, it would change the way waves added together, making certain frequencies louder and others quieter. In sound waves, frequency translates to pitch, so what you get is a very odd sounding voice.

To get a sense of what we'd sound like in a universe where the speed of sound moved ultra-fast, imagine how you sound when you take a deep breath out of a helium balloon — like Mickey Mouse. That's because sound waves move three times faster through helium, said William Robertson, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Middle Tennessee State University. "And we're talking about making the speed of sound a million times bigger," Robertson said.

And if the speed of sound were to suddenly speed up, it would wreak havoc on orchestras, Robertson said. When sound moves back and forth inside the cavity of an oboe or a trumpet, it produces a standing wave. These standing waves behave like those heavy ropes you see tethered to the wall at the gym. When a weight-lifter shakes them fast enough, waves begin oscillating up and down without appearing to travel across the rope. As the ropes are shaken faster and faster, the number of waves — in other words, their frequency — increases. Similarly, when the sound waves produced by wind instruments increase in speed, they increase in frequency. Because higher frequency means higher pitch, wind instruments would produce sounds so high in pitch, they'd be impossible for humans to hear. We would have to design wind instruments to be a million times longer to keep them in tune with the violins and cellos, Robertson said. (A change in the speed of sound as it moves through air wouldn't change the speed of sound along a string, he added.)

Alas, humans wouldn't survive to experience these spectacular changes. Even the soft whistle of a flute would blast anything in its vicinity to smithereens. Light travels in electromagnetic waves, which aren't composed of matter, but sound waves are mechanical — composed of particles colliding into one another. A molecule traveling at the speed of light would have "nearly infinite energy," Gollin said. It would blast through every particle it encountered, sending electrons flying and producing a "spray" of matter and antimatter — particles generated in ultra-high speed collisions that have properties opposite to those of matter. 

"The effects would just be extraordinary," Gollin said. 

Editor's note: Updated at 2:09 p.m. EST Nov. 30 to correct the article's explanation of how vocal cords and the voice box produce sound.

Originally published on Live Science.

Our solar system is home to some weird and wonderful weather, with storms more terrifying in scale than anything in Earth's recorded history. From centuries-old hurricanes on Jupiter to immense winds on Neptune, if you leave Earth you'll be shocked by what you find.

On Mars you will find immense dust storms that cover the entire planet, while Venus has an incredibly thick and fast-moving atmosphere that can form permanent vortices at its poles. On Jupiter and Saturn there are some huge storms — bigger than the diameter of multiple Earths — that have raged for decades or even centuries. On the ice giant Neptune you'll find the fastest winds in the solar system, and within Neptune and Uranus it may rain diamonds.

Thanks to recent missions into space, we have learned more about these fascinating weather systems than ever before. Scientists are also performing long-term studies of weather systems, such as storms erupting from the Sun that can have direct effects on Earth. As we continue to reach into the unknown, who knows what else there is to discover in the solar system?

Jupiter's Great Red Spot: An Earth-sized hurricane

This iconic storm has been raging on Jupiter for centuries, but it may not be around forever. The giant spinning storm is comparable to a hurricane on Earth, although it is considerably larger. It measures about 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers across), which is roughly 1.3 times the width of our planet. Scientists think its roots go up to 100 times deeper into Jupiter than Earth's oceans. Recent evidence, however, suggests the storm may be shrinking, although it can devour other storms to gain a boost.

That's not the only extreme weather on Jupiter: Its north and south poles have strange arrays of cyclones arranged in a circle, while the intense radiation from the planet bathes some of its moons, such as Io and Europa.

NASA's Juno spacecraft, which entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, has been collecting incredible data about this gas giant using an array of instruments. This includes a microwave radiometer to measure the deep atmosphere of Jupiter, ultraviolet and infrared cameras to take images of the planet's atmosphere and its aurorae, and JunoCam, which has also been busy snapping visible light images. 

Saturn's lightning: 10,000 times more powerful than Earth's

Amazingly we've not only seen lightning on Saturn, but we've also heard it. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, was able to spot lightning on the planet in the daytime, meaning it must have been incredibly intense — some bolts are thought to be 10,000 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to NASA. 

By observing radio emissions from the planet, Cassini was also able to 'hear' the storms discharging in the atmosphere. Saturn occasionally develops massive storms that extend more than 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers), encircling almost the entire planet, while the gas giant's north pole plays host to a weird, permanent hexagon of clouds that extends deep into the planet.

Solar storms: Angry outbursts that knock out power grids

The sun can wreak havoc on our planet. Its solar storms consist of bursts of radiation and charged particles, which can seriously damage satellites that keep a close eye on the sun's activity and prepare for the worst, but occasionally, when a large storm heads our way, satellites and power grids need to be turned off so they can ride it out. 

Despite our best efforts, every now and again a violent solar outburst can catch us off guard. In 1859, a powerful solar flare named after astronomer Richard Carrington caused widespread interruptions to global telegraph communications. The Carrington Event of 1859 also sparked incredible aurora displays that were visible as far south as the Caribbean. 

In 1989 a solar flare ravaged the electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station, causing a blackout that left six million people without electricity for nine hours. 

Solar activity has even been suggested to be a possible cause for the sinking of the Titanic. As new research suggests a solar storm behind the impressive northern light show at the time of the sinking could have disrupted the ship's navigation and communication systems and severely hindered rescue operations. 

Venus' vortex: A storm that moves faster than its planet

At the south pole of Venus is a large vortex the size of Europe swirling in the atmosphere. This vortex appears to have been around for a long time and is a result of some strange properties on the planet. The atmosphere on Venus moves faster than the planet, reaching speeds of up to 250 miles (400 kilometers) per hour — 60 times faster than the planet rotates, according to the European Space Agency. 

Venus is also the hottest planet in the solar system, but remarkably not the closest to the sun. Its hellishly dense atmosphere blankets the planet and traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect. As a result, Venusian temperatures can reach 870 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius). 

Even the rain on Venus offers no relief from the heinous climate. Corrosive sulfuric acid falls from clouds and evaporates before even reaching the ground due to the extreme surface temperatures.  

Neptune's mega wind: Faster than the speed of sound

Neptune, the furthest planet from the Sun, has the fastest winds in the solar system. At the planet's highest altitudes, where methane gives Neptune its blue color, winds can reach speeds of more than 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) per hour or 1.6 times the speed of sound. These immense winds also give rise to some large storms, such as the famous "Great Dark Spot" seen by the Voyager 2 probe in 1989. 

Scientists are still intrigued as to the cause of this fleeting storm which had vanished by the time NASA's Hubble Space Telescope turned its gaze to Neptune some five years after Voyager 2.

Since then Hubble has kept a watchful eye on Neptune's turbulent storms which rotate clockwise due to the planet's rotation (unlike hurricanes on Earth which are low-pressure systems and rotate counterclockwise). Over the years Hubble has noted the arrival and demise of many Neptunian storms, one of which has recently perplexed scientists. 

This particular vortex had been observed sweeping southward toward Neptune's equator, following the path of various storms before it. Though unlike its predecessors this vortex made a sharp U-turn and began to drift back northwards, much to the surprise of researchers. 

Martian dust storms: Tornados visible from space

In 2018 a huge dust storm engulfed the surface of Mars, obscuring much of its surface from our view. These storms, known as "haboobs" when they occur on Earth, are fairly regular on Mars, occurring every few years, but this one was particularly large. They are caused by the sun heating the atmosphere of the planet, lifting dust off the ground — although scientists aren't sure how they grow so big, according to NASA. They pose problems for solar-powered rovers on the surface, which rely on the sun's light.

Mars also experiences dust devils — miniature tornadoes that form and move across the surface. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the Red Planet, in fact, they're also observed on Earth. 

Dust devils are formed when the ground heats up causing air close to the surface to also warm up and rise. Whilst the air rises it can come into contact with cooler small segments of air higher up which in turn cause the column of air to rotate. 

We can see these dust devils due to the dirt they kick up off the ground. They're so visible they can even be seen from space! In 2012, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a colossal Martian dust devil standing 2,600 feet (800 meters) tall and 98 feet (30 meters) wide. 

Titan's methane rain: You'd feel every drop

Saturn's largest moon Titan is one of the most enigmatic bodies in the solar system. This Earth-like body hosts liquid on its surface, possesses a truly bizarre climate, and has been intriguing scientists for years.

On Titan methane occasionally falls as rain, after it evaporates from the surface and forms thick clouds. Methane rain on the freezing-cold moon would fall very slowly, due to the low gravity and thick haze, so you'd feel every drop, physicist Rajani Dhingra at the University of Idaho told New Scientist in 2019.

Titan's hydrological cycle (where "hydro" relates to methane not water like on Earth), sculpts the landscape and feeds liquid methane and ethane into huge lakes such as Kraken Mare which is more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep. 

Life on Earth may have begun with a flash of lightning.

No, an errant thunderbolt didn't literally animate the world's first microbes (sorry, Dr. Frankenstein). But according to a new study published Tuesday (March 16) in the journal Nature Communications, trillions of lightning strikes over a billion of years of Earth's early history may have helped unlock crucial phosphorus compounds that paved the way for life on Earth.

"In our study, we show for the first time that lightning strikes were likely a significant source of reactive phosphorus on Earth around the time that life formed [3.5 billion to 4.5 billion years ago]," lead study author Benjamin Hess, a graduate student at Yale University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told Live Science. "Lightning strikes may have therefore played a role in providing phosphorus for the emergence of life on Earth."

Related: Earth has a hidden layer, and no one knows exactly what it is

Bombarded with life?

How does a bolt from the blue lead to terrestrial life? It's all about the phosphorus — or rather, the organic materials that phosphorus atoms can make when combined with other bio-essential elements.

Take phosphates, for example — ions composed of three oxygen atoms and one phosphorus atom, which are crucial to all known forms of life. Phosphates form the backbones of DNA, RNA and ATP (the chief source of energy for cells), and are major components of bones, teeth and cell membranes.

But about 4 billion years ago, while there was likely plenty of water and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to work with, which are also essential for life's fundamental molecules, most of the planet's natural phosphorus was bound up in insoluble rock, and impossible to combine into organic phosphates. How, then, did Earth acquire these critical compounds?

One theory holds that early Earth got its phosphorous from meteors carrying a mineral called schreibersite, which is made partly of phosphorous and is soluble in water; if loads of schreibersite meteorites crashed into Earth over millions or billions of years, then enough phosphorus could be released into a concentrated area to create the right conditions for biological life, according to the new study.

However, about 3.5 billion to 4.5 billion years ago, when life on Earth emerged, the rate of meteor strikes on Earth dropped "exponentially" as most of our solar system's planets and moons had largely taken shape, Hess said. This fact complicates the interstellar phosphorus theory. 

However, there is another way to make schreibersite, right here on Earth, Hess said. All it takes is some land, a cloud and a few trillion jolts of lightning.

Billions of bolts

Lightning strikes can heat up surfaces to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius), forging new minerals that weren't there before. In the new study, Hess and his colleagues examined a lightning-blasted clump of rock, called fulgurite, which was previously excavated from a site in Illinois. The team found that little balls of schreibersite had formed within the rock, along with a host of other glassy minerals.

With tentative proof in hand that lightning strikes can create phosphorus-rich schreibersite, the team next had to calculate whether enough lightning could have struck early Earth to release a significant amount of the element into the environment. Using models of Earth's early atmosphere, the researchers estimated how many lightning strikes may have fallen over the planet each year.

Today, about 560 million lightning bolts flash over the planet a year; 4 billion years ago, when Earth's atmosphere was significantly richer in the greenhouse gas CO2 (and therefore hotter and more prone to storms), it's likely that anywhere from 1 billion to 5 billion bolts flashed each year, the team calculated. Of those bolts, the team estimated that between 100 million and 1 billion bolts struck land each year (the rest discharged above the oceans).

And, over a billion years, up to a quintillion (a 1 followed by 18 zeros) lightning strikes may have hit our young planet, each one releasing a bit of usable phosphorus, Hess said. The team calculated that, between 4.5 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, lightning strikes alone could have given Earth anywhere from 250 to 25,000 pounds of phosphorus (110 to 11,000 kilograms) per year.

That's a huge range, with a lot of uncertainty about the conditions of early Earth built into it. But Hess said that even the lowest quantity of phosphorus could have made a difference for the emergence of life.

"For life to form, there just needs to be one location that has the right ingredients," Hess told Live Science. "If [250 lbs.] of phosphorus a year were concentrated in a single tropical island arc, then yes, it may well have been enough. But it's more likely that will happen if there are many such locations."

Whether lightning did strike enough exposed land on early Earth to make an impact on life is a question that can never be fully answered. However, the new study shows that, mathematically, it was at least possible. 

It may be that a combination of asteroid impacts and lightning strikes ultimately gave Earth the phosphorus it needed to weave the first bio-essential molecules, such as DNA and RNA, the researchers concluded. But further studies of early terrestrial life should take care not to strike lightning from the record.

Originally published on Live Science.

Sprites and jets are fleeting atmospheric phenomena, hard enough to witness, let alone photograph. 

But a new image from an observatory in Hawaii captures both a red sprite and a blue jet in the same shot. The photo, released on Feb. 24, comes courtesy a "cloud cam" at the Gemini North telescope, part of the International Gemini Observatory located on Maunakea. 

Sprites and jets are upper-atmospheric phenomena caused by electrical discharges. Sprites, which are typically reddish-orange and sometimes blue-green, occur in the mesosphere, between 30 and 50 miles (50 and 80 kilometers) in altitude. They're often triggered by regular, lower-altitude lightning, but are much cooler in temperature. They're also sometimes shaped like jellyfish. Blue jets also occur at high altitude, triggered by a discharge of electricity from the positively-charged upper portion of a storm cloud to the negatively-charged cloud top, according to a paper published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature. They typically appear as blue streamers shooting spaceward. 

Related content: Elves, sprites and blue jets: Nature's weirdest lightning

The camera that captured the red sprite and blue jet was a modified consumer-grade DSLR (digital single-lens reflex), customized to take photographs within a fraction of a second to 30 seconds after lightning strikes. The cameras are mounted on the roof of the observatory, pointed toward the most likely locations of incoming storms. The Gemini North Observatory sits at 13,800 feet (4,200 meters), affording a fabulous view of the surrounding weather.

Though sprites and jets are rarely witnessed from the ground, they're not uncommon above thunderstorms. In 2017, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station witnessed 245 blue flashes in 160 seconds over one storm. Scientists debate whether these phenomena are simply transient or whether they have any lasting effects. For example, if their passage alters the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, they might have an effect on the ozone layer, researcher Hans Stenbaek-Nielsen of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks told Live Science in 2011.

Studying sprites and jets is difficult, physicist Ryan Haaland of Fort Lewis College in Colorado told Live Science in 2015. Scientists take measurements from ground-based observatories and sometimes fly specially-instrumented research aircraft close to storms to detect them. But as the phenomena last just tens of milliseconds, they remain mysterious.

Originally published on Live Science.

Electrifying video footage has captured the moment just before lightning strikes, when thin tendrils of electricity reach down from the sky and up from the ground, until they collide with a dramatic flash.

Using a high-speed camera, researchers captured images of lightning as it struck a 1,066-foot-tall (325 meters) meteorology tower in Beijing. Two consecutive frames, each lasting 2.63 microseconds, show the moment when the downward-reaching and upward-reaching fingers of the lightning bolt suddenly touch, releasing a massive electrical discharge and a bright flash of light.

The images shed light on the so-called breakthrough phase, the instant when the lightning fingers begin to approach each other but have not yet connected. This is one of the "most poorly understood processes in lightning physics," but it's critical for understanding where the lightning will ultimately strike, the authors wrote in a report published Feb. 1 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Related: Elves, sprites & blue jets: Photos of Earth's weirdest lightning 

"The target of the lightning strike is not determined at the beginning when it initiates from the cloud," study co-author Rubin Jiang, an atmospheric physicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Laboratory for Middle Atmosphere and Global Environment Observation, said in a statement. The breakthrough phase "is the process that eventually determines the object that's struck by the lightning flash."

Because the breakthrough phase happens so quickly, scientists have struggled to observe what occurs in those critical moments. The new high-speed camera footage provides a clearer picture of the elusive event.

Lighting begins when a concentration of negatively charged particles builds up in a cloud, causing a complementary positive charge to build up in the ground below, according to the statement. Channels of low-current electricity, called "leaders," descend from the cloud, splitting off into many branches. As these branches near the ground, they attract positively charged leaders that leap from objects below; this leads to the breakthrough phase, when the leaders of opposite charge approach each other. 

There are two theories as to what happens when these leaders meet. One theory posits that both leaders emit several lines of electricity, called "streamers." (Think of leaders like long lengths of thread, with streamers as the fraying ends of that thread.) According to the first theory, several streamers from both leaders intertwine to form a single channel of searing-hot plasma. An electrical current can then flow along this channel, causing the lightning flash. 

However, the new study supports a different theory. In the footage, instead of many streamers merging to form a plasma channel, only one negative streamer and one positive streamer make a connection. 

The video first shows a single downward-reaching leader heading toward one upward-reaching leader. When the leaders come within 75 feet (23 m) of each other, they form a "common streamer zone," and a bright, thin thread of electricity appears between them, connecting their tips. The thinness of the thread suggests that only two streamers merged to form it, the authors wrote. In the following frames, this glowing thread quickly swells into a thick plasma channel that fully merges the leaders, resulting in a luminous flash. 

After the two lucky streamers made a connection, the other remaining streamers simply faded away. That said, the study authors need to observe more lightning strikes to confirm that the phenomenon always unfolds this way, according to the statement.

Originally published on Live Science. 

Scientists on the International Space Station spotted a bright-blue lightning bolt shooting upward from thunderclouds. 

Blue jets can be difficult to spot from the ground, since the electrical discharges erupt from the tops of thunderclouds. But from space, scientists can peer down at this cerulean lightshow from above. On Feb. 26, 2019, instruments aboard the space station captured a blue jet shooting out of a thunderstorm cell near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean. The scientists described the event in a new report, published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature. 

The scientists first saw five intense flashes of blue light, each lasting about 10 to 20 milliseconds. The blue jet then fanned out from the cloud in a narrow cone shape that stretched into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer that extends from about 6 to 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

Related: Photos of elves and blue jets: See Earth's weirdest lightning 

Blue jets seem to appear when the positively-charged upper region of a cloud interacts with the negatively charged boundary between the cloud and the air above, according to the report. The blue jet appears as a result of this "electric breakdown," where the opposing charges swap places in the cloud and briefly equalize, releasing static electricity. However, the properties of blue jets and the altitude to which they extend above clouds "are not well characterized," the authors noted, so this study adds to our understanding of the dramatic phenomenon. 

Four of the flashes preceding the blue jet came with a small pulse of ultraviolet light (UV), the scientists noted. They identified these emissions as so-called "elves," another phenomenon seen in the upper atmosphere. 

"Elves" — an acronym that stands for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources — are light emissions that appear as rapidly expanding rings in the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles that extends from roughly 35 miles to 620 miles (60 to 1,000 km) above the planet surface. Elves occur when radio waves push electrons through the ionosphere, causing them to accelerate and collide with other charged particles, releasing energy as light, the authors wrote.

The team observed the flashes, elves and blue jet using the European Space Agency's Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), a collection of optical cameras, photometers, X-ray detectors and gamma-ray detectors attached to a module on the space station. 

"This paper is an impressive highlight of the many new phenomena ASIM is observing above thunderstorms," Astrid Orr, physical sciences coordinator for human and robotic spaceflight with the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement. Experts also suspect that upper atmosphere phenomena, like blue jets, may affect the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, since the ozone layer sits within the stratosphere where they occur, according to the ESA statement. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Superbolts — flashes of lightning that are up to 1,000 times brighter than average — really do exist, two new studies confirm.

A landmark study coined the term in the 1970s, but in the intervening years, experts questioned if superbolts are genuinely brighter than most other lightning, or if they simply appear brighter depending on the angle of the satellite observation.

Recently, after evaluating years of data, scientists confirmed these ultrabright bolts can produce at least 100 gigawatts of power (to put that into perspective, the power produced by all the solar panels and wind turbines in the United States in 2018 was about 163 gigawatts, according to the U.S. Department of Energy).

The researchers also discovered that much like comic-book superheroes, superbolts have an unusual origin story. Lightning forms when electrical charges in clouds and on the ground interact, and in most of these events the clouds are negatively charged. However, superbolts form during rare cloud-to-ground interactions in which the clouds are positively charged, the scientists reported.

Related: How big can lightning get?

Superbolts were first described as lightning flashes that were "over 100 times more intense than typical lightning," according to a study published in 1977 in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Lightning data for that study came from observations by Vela satellites, which were launched in 1969 to detect nuclear explosions from space, and operated until 1979, according to NASA.

Vela's instruments recorded thousands of lightning strikes per year, including superbolts that struck around the world, "with most frequent occurrence over the North Pacific Ocean," B. N. Turman, a researcher with the Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, wrote in the study. 

One superbolt flash near South Africa in 1979 was so powerful that it was thought to be the detonation of a nuclear bomb, The New York Times reported that year. Another superbolt that struck Newfoundland in 1978 left "a one‐mile swath of damage" in its wake, the Times reported.

"Trees were split; television antennas were twisted beyond recognition; transformers were shattered and circuit breakers hung from power‐line poles, and there were craters in the new‐fallen snow," according to the Times.

But superbolts are also super-rare, occurring only about five times in 10 million flashes, Turman wrote in the study.

"The brightest lighting"

For the two new studies, both published on Nov. 12 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, researchers again turned to satellites for superbolt observations. 

The first study described the brightest lightning flashes over the Americas, recorded between 2018 and 2020 by a sensor called the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) mounted on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites – R Series (GOES-R). 

"We focused on superbolts that are substantially brighter than normal lightning — at least 100 times more energetic — and then looked at the top pulses above that threshold, with the top cases even going beyond 1,000 times brighter," said Michael Peterson, lead author on both studies and a remote-sensing researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

In the second study, scientists analyzed data collected from 1997 to 2010 by the Fast On‐Orbit Recording of Transient Events (FORTE) satellite. They learned that certain viewing conditions did affect lightning brightness — when the satellite's view was unobstructed by clouds, a bolt could appear somewhat brighter — and some suspected superbolt observations did fall into that category, the study authors reported. However, those circumstances "are only a problem for the dimmer cases near the minimum superbolt threshold," and real superbolts were significantly brighter than that, Peterson told Live Science in an email.

GLM and FORTE are both optical instruments, but they measure slightly different aspects of lightning pulses, Peterson said. FORTE recorded "instantaneous peak power" of the superbolts — the moment they were at their brightest. By comparison, GLM measured superbolts' total energy over a 2-microsecond period. That might not seem like very long, "but it is for lightning, where much of the activity happens at microsecond scales," Peterson said.

The scientists found that superbolts could emanate from electrical pulses between clouds, as well as from cloud-to-ground pulses. Superbolts that appeared over the ocean were fueled by the gradual buildup of electrical charges in the stormclouds, so it wasn't surprising that bolts would be more powerful when all that electricity was eventually released, according to the study.

The brightest superbolts tended to cluster in geographic regions where large thunderstorms are common, and superbolt appearance was associated with "long-horizontal lightning flashes that can span hundreds of kilometers, which have been recently termed 'megaflashes,'" Peterson said. These new findings could help scientists to better understand the scenarios that can shape these unusually powerful strikes.

"It turns out that these flashes are exceptional in all of their characteristics — not just their size," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Lightning recently killed two giraffes in South Africa; one of the giraffes — a 5-year-old female — had a fractured skull and a broken ossicone (giraffes' knoblike horns), indicating that she died after a lightning strike directly to the head.

The giraffes were found on March 2 after a thunderstorm in Rockwood, a private nature reserve located about 112 miles (180 kilometers) to the west of Kimberley, South Africa. 

Ciska P. J. Scheijen, a student in the Department of Animal, Wildlife and Grassland Sciences at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, described the fatal event on Sept. 8 in the African Journal of Ecology, suggesting that the animals' height may have increased their risk for electrocution during the storm, turning them into living lightning rods.

Related: Rare white giraffe photographed

However, no peer-reviewed studies have shown that giraffes are more prone to lightning strikes than other animals, Live Science reported in 2017, and Scheijen did not present any new data on the subject.

There are four ways that lightning strikes can kill an animal, according to Schiejen's paper. It can strike the animal directly or it can hit as a "side flash," arcing into the animal's body after striking a nearby object. It can also be lethal through "touch potential," when the electrical current jolts through an animal that is in direct contact with a lightning-struck object. Finally, lightning can also deliver a deadly current through "step potential," which electrifies the animal through the ground.

The giraffes in South Africa died surrounded by bushes and grasses, but there were no trees nearby; an adult male giraffe stands about 18 feet (5.5 meters) tall, while females measure about 14 feet (4.3 m) tall; so the giraffes would easily have been the tallest targets in the area. The body of the second giraffe, a female about 4 years old, was found about 23 feet (7 m) from the giraffe with the cracked skull. There were no visible signs of injury on the younger giraffe, hinting that it received a lethal dose of electricity through the ground as its companion was directly struck, Scheijen reported.

"Both giraffes had a very strong ammonia-like smell," Scheijen added. Researchers had previously mentioned a similar odor surrounding a lightning-struck giraffe, in a study published in 2014 in the journal Vulture News.

Death from above

Thousands of animals are injured each year by lightning, according to a study published in 2012 in the International Journal of Biometeorology. And some animals are more vulnerable than others. Those with "a large separation between their front and back feet" are more likely to suffer significant lightning damage because their feet can act as points in a circuit that channel voltage, after lightning strikes the ground or a nearby object, according to the study.

Ground current electrocution is the most common cause of group death for animals during electrical storms. In one exceptional event in 2016, lightning killed 323 reindeer — including seven calves — through ground current, as the reindeer huddled close together during the storm.

In the case of the South African giraffes, Scheijen concluded that a direct lightning strike killed the older female, "while the other female, found some 7 m [23 feet] away, died likely either from a side flash or step potential," Scheijen reported. 

"Given that lightning bolts tend to hit tall objects, especially in open areas, the height of giraffes may make them particularly vulnerable to fatal electrocution," Scheijen said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on Thursday, July 9 at 11 a.m. ET.

There's an electrical hum in most animals, including ourselves. No one knows where it came from or why exactly it exists. Now, new research suggests this electric hum came from primordial lightning. 

In most vertebrates and invertebrates, there is constant background cellular electrical activity, often coursing through the nervous system, with a small frequency range from 5 to 45 Hertz. A new study, published in the journal International Journal of Biometeorology, notes this extremely low frequency (ELF) range overlaps with natural vibrations in the atmosphere caused by lightning.

Related: How big can lightning get?

"About 20 years ago, we started to discover that many biological systems, from the simplest of organisms like zooplankton in the ocean to our brains, have electrical activity in exactly the same frequency range as that produced by global lightning activity," Colin Price, lead author on the new study and researcher at the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science. "We think that on evolutionary timescales, over billions of years, life-forms may have used what nature has given them and have somehow either synchronized to those frequencies or adapted to them." 

Around the planet, flashes of lightning strike the ground 50 to 100 times per second. These strikes have been known since the 1960s to create extremely low frequency  waves of electromagnetic energy that resonate around the planet's atmosphere t. Known as Schumann resonances, these ELF waves  have encircled the planetor billions of years — ever since Earth has had an atmosphere. While the strongest resonance is at a frequency close to 8 Hz, several others occur between 3 and 60 Hz.Today, Schumann resonances can be measured anywhere on Earth that is electrically quiet, such as in a desert, far from electrical grids.

The new theory proposes primordial cells may have somehow synced their electric activity with these natural atmospheric resonances, particularly the peak resonance near 8 Hz. Such synchronization isn't uncommon. We synchronize our circadian rhythm to days and seasons; and many species navigate off  Earth's magnetic field. 

"Evolution exploits whatever it can," said Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University in Massachusetts who was not involved with the new research. He noted for example, "When living things are screened [blocked] from a geomagnetic field, they don't develop right."

Today, not all life vibrates at exactly the Schumann resonance. The researchers suggest that while early life was synced at around 8 Hz, the cellular activity in animals slowly drifted to other frequencies as the animals evolved, with different frequencies being used for different types of activity in the brain.  For example, specific frequencies in human brain waves have been linked to specific mental states such as alertness, dreaming and deep sleep. The Schumann resonance is closest to frequencies found in humans' deep relaxed state, suggesting primordial life could have been in a state similar to deep relaxation.

Related: 10 things we learned about the human body in 2019

While there is a possibility that this research might lead to medical applications, it is highly unlikely this resonance could be exploited for harmful applications, the researchers note. The waves, the researchers note, are a natural state and one we are constantly surrounded by. 

"We're living in these fields, we've adapted to them, we've evolved with them, and they may have affected our evolution," Price told Live Science. "But I don't think that these fields are affecting us directly today. Otherwise, every time there was a thunderstorm nearby, we would be falling over or something."

The researchers haven't yet identified how lightnings' resonance and biological electrical activity could have become synced. One idea is that lightning strikes could have affected calcium ion transfer within the cells, which is how most electrical activity in animals arises. 

Not all scientists are onboard with the new theory.. “The proposal... in all fairness, is speculative,” said James Lin, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved with the new research. For example, Lin notes that some electrical signals, such as ones that control heart rate, are more correlated with body mass than the Schumann resonance. 

The researchers are continuing to look at possible mechanisms as well as extending their work into the botany realm, looking for effects of these atmospheric resonances on photosynthesis. 

"There's more and more evidence that there does appear to be links between these natural atmospheric frequencies and biological organisms," Price told Live Science. "But we don't understand it ⎯ what the connections are and how it's working, so it's just a start. We just published this to kind of put it out there. Hopefully others can advance it and go further on it."

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Note: This story was updated to remove a statement that the 5 Hz to 45 Hz range is well below the sound wave frequencies that humans can hear. Humans can hear sounds in this range.

On Halloween in 2018, the sky tore open above Brazil. A single gargantuan lightning bolt sliced through the atmosphere over the country's southern tip, stretching more than 440 miles (700 kilometers) from the Atlantic coast into the edge of Argentina.

According to a new analysis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), this epic "megaflash" was the single longest lightning bolt ever recorded.

Using new satellite technology, scientists confirmed that the epic bolt was more than twice as long as the previous record-holder, a 200-mile-long (320 km) bolt that blazed over Oklahoma in 2007. It's not that lightning is getting bigger, the researchers noted in a statement — rather, lightning-monitoring technology is improving by leaps and bounds.

Related: How big can lightning get?

"It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as lightning-detection technology improves," Randall Cerveny, chief rapporteur of Weather and Climate Extremes for WMO, said in the statement. 

Lightning occurs when cold air and warm air collide inside thunderstorms, Live Science previously reported. Ice crystals in the cold air bump into water droplets in the warm air, creating friction and electrical charges that move throughout the cloud. When the bottom of a cloud becomes too overloaded with negative charges, electricity courses towards a positively-charged region, either on the ground or elsewhere in the cloud. 

Lightning tends to strike most often in regions of high humidity (where convection causes more thunderstorms to form) and mountainous regions with high altitude. For these reasons, South America is one of the world’s leading lightning hotspots. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is considered the lightning capital of the world, with electrical storms flashing across the sky nearly 300 nights a year, according to a 2016 NASA study. 

For the new analysis (which will also be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters), WMO scientists studied several large lighting strikes recorded by four weather-monitoring satellites operated by the U.S., the European Union and China. This space-eye view gave the researchers an edge over previous studies, which confirmed record-breaking bolts primarily with ground-based monitoring networks, the team wrote.

In addition to the nearly 440-mile-long bolt (long enough to connect Boston to Washington, D.C., or Toronto to Chicago), the new analysis also revealed a new record-breaker for longest bolt duration. That honor goes to a bolt that lit up the sky over northern Argentina for nearly 17 seconds in March 2019. The previous record-setter flashed over France for 7.74 seconds in August 2012.

• What Causes Eerie Volcanic Lightning?
• Elves, Sprites & Blue Jets: Earth's Weirdest Lightning
• What If Earth's Magnetic Poles Flip?

Originally published on Live Science.

Dark fluffy thunderclouds don't just fuel dramatic storms, they also produce some of the most energetic flashes of light on the planet —  and brilliant sky displays known as ultrasonic "elves." Now, new findings have painted a clearer picture of what's going on in the silent interludes of a stormy sky.

For a long time, scientists have been searching for gamma-ray flashes in the deep folds of the universe. In 1994, while peering out into space in search for these signals, a NASA instrument happened to pick up on gamma-ray flashes that were emitted from somewhere closer to home — earthly thunderclouds.

These flashes, the most energetic natural phenomena on our planet, became known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). They're created when a thunderstorms' strong electric field excites atmospheric particles, which then emit radiation. But not much was known about what causes this high-energy phenomenon. 

Related: Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning

To figure this out, a group of researchers analyzed data from a European Space Agency instrument called the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) aboard the International Space Station. The ASIM is the first instrument to be used for the purpose of detecting TGFs, rather than their even brighter doppelgängers out in deep space, said Torsten Neubert, the head scientist of the ASIM and lead author of a study published Dec. 10 in the journal Science. 

Their measurements showed a very specific sequence of events, lasting only a couple of milliseconds long, during a lightning strike. First, they detected an increase in light, which corresponds to the birth of a lightning bolt. During that process, a cloud creates both an electric field and a leader — a path of ionized air. They then detected a big peak in X-rays and gamma-rays, which correspond to the TGF, and then a huge optical pulse, Neubert told Live Science. 

This optical pulse traveled up from the thundercloud to the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere some 50 to 600 miles (80 to 1,000 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The pulse was "so powerful that it excited the lower region of the ionosphere," which is approximately 100 kilometers far and wide, Neubert said. In other words, it excited free electrons in the ionosphere, which then began colliding with neutral nitrogen and then emitted radiation.

This radiation is defined by another weather phenomenon, similar to auroras, called "elves," in which millisecond-long bursts of visible light and ultraviolet radiation glow in an expanding ring around a lightning strike. These luminous celestial beings, however, are visible only with the most sensitive equipment. 

Prior to this study, elves were thought to be unrelated to thunderstorms. Their findings suggest that the same lightning bolt triggers both TGFs and elves, though it's not clear if TGFs have any role in producing the elves, Neubert said. It's also not clear if TGFs and elves happen every time lightning strikes, but it likely happens much more often than we can detect, he added.

Another recent finding, published Dec. 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, suggests that TGFs happen right before visible lightning. These brilliant flashes occur right before a pulse of electricity shoots through the charged cloud, becoming a lightning bolt, according to a statement. Both of these studies were presented this week at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco.

"A lot of stuff is happening within space observations for lightning," some for monitoring weather and some for understanding the phenomenon, Neubert said. "Taken together [there's a] truly magnificent couple of years that are coming up."

• Photos: Skydiver Sean MacCormac 'Surfs' on Thunderstorm Clouds
• Images: Amazing Shots of Storms Light Up Weather Photo Contest
• Dramatic Photos Show Wildfire Smoke Sucked Up by Storm

Originally published on Live Science.

SAN FRANCISCO — When NASA's Apollo 12 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 14, 1969, the sight was electrifying — and not in a good way. 

Moments after liftoff, at 36.5 seconds and at 52 seconds, two bolts of lightning triggered by the launch struck the rocket. Systems onboard Apollo 12 were thrown offline, but disaster was averted thanks to the quick thinking of NASA engineers and astronauts, who deftly responded to an emergency they had never anticipated or practiced in any training simulation.

The Apollo 12 incident sparked new research into the causes of launch-triggered lighting to better understand the cause and to ensure the safety of future missions, researchers told a rapt audience on Wednesday (Dec. 11) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Related: These 6 Accidents Nearly Derailed Apollo 11’s Mission to the Moon

Philip Krider, a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, served for more than 50 years on an expert panel created by NASA to investigate lightning discharges triggered by launches. Prior to Apollo 12, lightning's potential impact on space vehicles was considered only during the window prior to launch, scientists wrote in an official analysis of the incident prepared for NASA in February 1970. 

In fact, "the possibility of the vehicle becoming involved with lightning after liftoff was not a launch consideration, unless natural lightning activity was actually present in the launch complex area," the analysis said. The idea that the vehicle itself could generate lightning was unheard of, according to the report.

At the AGU meeting, Krider described the event that took place 50 years ago. 

"They launched the vehicle into a weakly electrified environment associated with a weak cold front passing right over the space center," Krider said. The launch first triggered a cloud-to-ground lightning discharge, setting off warning lights and alarms in the crew compartment of the spacecraft. Communications were interrupted, instruments and clocks went haywire, and all three fuel cells disconnected. The second lightning strike stayed in the cloud and had no ground contact, but it shut down the rocket's navigation system, said Krider. 

"I don't know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out," commander Pete Conrad said to mission control at the time. 

"They had never practiced such a catastrophic electrical failure," Krider said. "All the circuit breakers in the spacecraft were flashing red — it was really a bad thing from their point of view."

Analysis later showed that the cold front's current, though too weak to produce natural lightning, was strong enough for the rocket and its ionized, electrically conductive exhaust plume to produce a charge and generate two lightning strikes, scientists wrote in the 1970 report.

On the ground at NASA mission control, flight controller John Aaron realized that the disrupted readout on his screen resembled one he had seen in a flight simulation, the data similarly scrambled by a voltage interruption. He recommended switching the rocket's signal conditioning equipment (SCE) to auxiliary, which would reset the system. Fortunately, lunar module pilot Alan Bean knew exactly where that switch was, and soon the system was reset and the fuel cells were back online.

"And then, Alan Bean, when they were in Earth orbit, was able to realign the inertial platform manually using a practice procedure," Krider said.

The Apollo 12 emblem was a sailing ship, the "Yankee Clipper." Upon the astronaut's safe return, NASA mission control updated its display of the emblem to include the words "Damn the lightning, full speed ahead!" And Aaron's simple but effective solution — "Try SCE to AUX" — is now a popular nerdy catchphrase that can be found on mugs and T-shirts, Krider said at AGU.

Over the years that followed, significant changes were made to rocket launch protocols. Meanwhile, close collaboration between NASA's mission control engineers and meteorologists pinpointed weather conditions that could prove electrically hazardous to spacecraft, James Dye, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a longtime member of NASA's lightning advisory panel, said at AGU.

Does this mean that rockets never generate lightning anymore? Not quite. On May 27, a Russian Soyuz rocket launch set off a powerful lightning flash, "so triggered lightning is still a hazard," Dye said. However, a number of environmental factors during the Russian launch strongly suggested that there was a risk of lightning prior to liftoff, he said as he highlighted images of the launch during the AGU presentation. 

"You can see that the background is very cloudy, dark and overcast, rainy. There were also indications on the ground that there were strong electric fields. In reality, it shouldn't have been launched," Dye said.

• Top 10 Amazing Moon Facts
• Top Moon Conspiracy Theories and Why They Are Stupid
• Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit

Originally published on Live Science.

St. Elmo's fire is a persistent blue glow that occasionally appears near pointy objects during storms. The name is something of a misnomer, as the electric phenomenon has more in common with lightning or the northern lights than it does with flame. 

Captains of the seas and skies know St. Elmo's fire best, as the ethereal light has long been sighted clinging to the masts of ships and more recently the wings of planes. Mariners have noted the spectacle for thousands of years, but only in the last century and a half have scientists learned enough about the structure of matter to understand why the phenomenon takes place. It's not gods or saints that kindle the enigmatic fire, but one of the five states of matter: plasma. 

Reports of blue lights dimly flickering from the rigs of ships date back to antiquity, when the Greeks and Romans interpreted the sight as visitations from the demigod twins Castor and Pollux. Considered saviors of those in danger, the twins' apparition would have come as a hopeful sign to sailors weathering a storm. 

The phenomenon later got its modern name from St. Erasmus, or St. Elmo for short, who lived in the third century. St. Elmo gained fame as the patron saint of sailors and intestinal distress, after he was reportedly killed by disemboweling. Sailors prayed to him in moments of distress and continued to interpret the glow of St. Elmo's fire dancing and hissing on the tips of their boats as a favorable omen.

What causes St. Elmo's fire?  

A scientific understanding of St. Elmo's fire became possible only after British chemist and physicist William Crookes produced what he called "radiant matter" through his work with vacuum tubes in 1879. The discovery of the electron came two decades later, revealing that the world was made of more than neutral atoms. Finding that atoms contained smaller, charged particles proved essential to understanding why Crookes's matter shined, launching the whole new field of plasma physics. 

Plasma occurs when excess energy breaks up atoms in a neutral gas to create a charged gas. One way to create plasma is with heat. For example, heating solid ice breaks molecular crystals into liquid water, and boiling liquid water liberates water molecules to rise as a gaseous vapor. Continue to dump energy into the vapor (by heating it past 21,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 12,000 degrees Celsius, for instance), and the atoms in the water molecules get roughed up, losing their electrons and becoming charged ions. This point represents the transition from a gas, a cloud of neutral particles, to a plasma, a cloud containing many charged particles. 

Electricity can tear up gas molecules and make a plasma more easily than heat can, which is the key to St. Elmo's fire. During a storm, friction builds up extra electrons in certain parts of clouds, generating powerful electric fields that reach the ground. A strong enough field can theoretically break air down into a plasma anywhere, but in practice, sharp points (such as the mast of a ship) tend to concentrate the field, stripping electrons from atoms to leave behind charged ions in especially high numbers near sharp places. 

Related: Elves, Sprites & Blue Jets: Earth's Weirdest Lightning

Once the air around a mast has partially transformed into a plasma, St. Elmo's fire shines via a process called corona discharge. As the electric field slings electrons around, they knock into neutral particles and agitate those neutral particles into a more energetic state. 

Imagine "some bully going through the schoolyard kicking all the kids," said Kristina Lynch, a plasma physicist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. "They get all excited, and then they have to relax." To cool down, the excited particles emit a photon of light with a particular energy and color. For nitrogen and oxygen, which dominate in Earth's atmosphere, that burst of light burns blue and violet, respectively.

St. Elmo's fire isn't lightning

While St. Elmo's fire tends to take place in stormy conditions, it's a distinct phenomenon from lightning. A lightning bolt’s glow contains blue and purple for the same reason, but it also shines white — a mixture of many colors — as it heats the air around it. 

The colorful lights of the aurora get their glow from relaxing particles as well, although the electrons that excite these particles ultimately get their energy from the solar wind, rather than electrically charged clouds. Many also confuse St. Elmo's fire with ball lightning, another incandescent phenomenon known for millennia. While those hovering spheres of light remain poorly understood, the two events have been reported together, as in this mountaineer's account from 1977, reported in the Journal of Scientific Exploration:

"Just under me, there was a dilapidated building. I could see still tongues of light-blue flame on every point of steel framework which protruded from the ruins. The flame was of various sizes. The higher was the point, the larger was a tongue of flame on it. Still lower, at a height of 4,000 to 4,100 m [1,300 to 1,350 feet], lightning was flashing. Orange balls of the size of a soccer ball were flying by the wind on the background of black clouds."

Is St. Elmo's fire dangerous?

Fortunately for hikers and sailors, St. Elmo's fire doesn't burn or present any immediate danger beyond the potentially stormy weather itself.

Engineers, however, must take corona discharge into account when designing electrical equipment, particularly power lines, as unwanted instances of St. Elmo's fire can sap valuable electricity. To minimize that effect, many long-distance power lines feature hoop-like "corona rings" around pointy areas such as the tips of towers and poles. These rings keep the electric field from getting concentrated enough to produce a lot of plasma. 

In other cases, engineers have found ways to use corona discharge to their advantage. The process is involved in the production of ozone, an industrial disinfectant. Corona discharge also plays a role in creating the charged surfaces needed inside a photocopier. 

While researchers have demystified the phenomenon and put it to work in modern technology, the harmless but captivating glow of St. Elmo’s fire still has the power to astonish bystanders, just as it has for millenia.

Additional resources: 

• The plasma in St. Elmo's fire is the same as what's in a neon sign; read more from Scientific American.
• This training video from Northwest Lineman College in Idaho shows where corona discharge happens in power lines. 
• Watch this explanation of St. Elmo's fire from the Plasma Channel on YouTube.

Wildfires burning large swaths of Russia are generating so much smoke, they're visible from space, new images from NASA's Earth Observatory reveal.

Since June, more than 100 wildfires have raged across the Arctic, which is especially dry and hot this summer. In Russia alone, wildfires are burning in 11 of the country's 49 regions, meaning that even in fire-free areas, people are choking on smoke that is blowing across the country.

The largest fires — blazes likely ignited by lightning — are located in the regions of Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Buryatia, according to the Earth Observatory. These conflagrations have burned 320 square miles (829 square kilometers), 150 square miles (388 square km) and 41 square miles (106 square km) in these regions, respectively, as of July 22. [In Photos: Fossil Forest Unearthed in the Arctic]

The above natural-color image, taken on July 21, shows plumes rising from fires on the right side of the photo. Winds carry the smoke toward the southwest, where it mixes with a storm system. The image was captured with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP, a weather satellite operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Russian city of Krasnoyarsk is under a layer of haze, the Earth Observatory reported. And while Novosibirsk, Siberia's largest city, doesn't have any fires as of now, smoke carried there by the winds caused the city's air quality to plummet.

Wildfires are also burning in Greenland and parts of Alaska, following what was the hottest June in recorded history. It's common for fires to burn during the Arctic's summer months, but the number and extent this year are "unusual and unprecedented," Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), a part of the European Union's Earth observation program, told CNN.

These fires are taking a toll on the atmosphere; they've released about 100 megatons of carbon dioxide from June 1 to July 21, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide Belgium released in 2017, according to CAMS, CNN reported.

The Arctic is heating up faster than other parts of the world, making it easier for fires to thrive there. In Siberia, for example, the average June temperature this year is nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 degrees Celsius) hotter than the long-term average between 1981 and 2010, Claudia Volosciuk, a scientist with the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN.

Many of this summer's fires are burning farther north than usual, and some appear to be burning in peat soils, rather than in forests, Thomas Smith, an assistant professor of environmental geography at the London School of Economics, told USA Today. This is a dangerous situation, because whereas forests might typically burn for a few hours, peat soils can blaze for days or even months, Smith said.

Moreover, peat soils are known carbon reservoirs. As they burn, they release carbon, "which will further exacerbate greenhouse warming, leading to more fires," Smith said.

• In Photos: The Deadly Carr Fire Blazes Across Northern California
• In Photos: Devastating Wildfires in Northern California
• In Photos: The Vanishing Ice of Baffin Island

Originally published on Live Science.

Tragedy struck when a motorcyclist driving in Florida during a thunderstorm was struck by lightning, causing him to crash and die on Sunday (June 9), according to news sources.

The man's death, the second U.S. fatality from lightning this year, may make some people wonder why the motorcycle's rubber tires didn't protect the 45-year-old from the lightning bolt. But this belief is an urban legend, said John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Lightning Safety Council.

"It's a myth that rubber tires protect a vehicle from being struck by lightning," Jensenius told Live Science in an email. [Elves, Sprites & Blue Jets: Earth's Weirdest Lightning] 

Vehicles are struck by lightning fairly regularly. But if you find yourself stuck on the road during a lightning storm, it's best to be in a hard-topped metal vehicle, Jensenius said. That's because the metal exterior acts like a Faraday cage. The cage — named for the 19th-century scientist British Michael Faraday, who studied electromagnetism and electrochemistry — keeps any electrical charge that hits it in its outer metal shell, away from the interior (in this case, any passengers within a vehicle).

"If struck, the electrical charge will pass around the metal shell of a hard-topped vehicle and into the ground, often passing through or over the tires," Jensenius said. "If people can't get inside a substantial building, we recommend that they get inside a hard-topped metal vehicle with the windows rolled up."

In the man's case, he was driving southbound on Interstate 95 in Volusia County, Florida, according to Click Orlando. Lightning struck the man's helmet, officials said, based on a blast mark on the helmet's plastic shell.

Jensenius was quick to debunk another myth about lightning — the idea that it can't strike you if you're traveling fast enough. But lightning travels far too quickly to be outrun by humans, he said.

"The time it takes to go from the cloud base to the ground is only a small fraction of a second," Jensenius said. "During this time, anything traveling at highway speeds is virtually standing still with respect to the lightning."

Since 2006, there have been 10 lightning fatalities related to motorcycles in the United States, "although, in several cases, the rider was not on the bike when struck," Jensenius said.

• Images: Red Sprite Lightning Revealed in Stunning Photos
• Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning
• What Are Your Odds of Dying From …?

Originally published on Live Science.

As human ancestors went from swinging through trees to walking on two legs, they may have received a boost from an unlikely source: ancient supernovas.

These powerful stellar explosions may have showered Earth with enough energy to shift the planet's climate, bathing Earth in electrons and sparking powerful, lightning-filled storms, according to a new hypothesis.

Lightning then could have kindled raging wildfires that scorched African landscapes. As savanna replaced the forest habitat, early humans that lived there may have been pushed to walk on two legs, the new study suggests. [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans]

However, don't go jumping to conclusions just yet. Many factors likely contributed to the evolution of bipedalism, a process that began many millions of years before these stellar explosions took place, one expert told Live Science.

Clues to the ancient supernovas were found in traces of iron-60 in Earth's crust. This radioactive isotope, or version of iron, originates in stars nearing the ends of their lives; it's thought to have arrived on Earth after the violent explosion of supernovas in our cosmic neighborhood millions of years ago, scientists wrote in the new study.

Prior studies described traces of iron-60 preserved on Earth from stars that blew up, beginning around 8 million years ago. That explosive activity peaked with a supernova (or series of supernovas) that occurred about 123 light-years away from Earth about 2.6 million years ago, the scientists reported. Around that time, the dawn of the Pleistocene epoch, forests in eastern Africa began to give way to open grasslands.

High-energy emissions from the supernovas may have been strong enough to penetrate the troposphere, ionizing Earth's atmosphere and affecting the planet's weather, lead study author Adrian Melott, a professor emeritus with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kansas, told Live Science.

The researchers estimated that energy infusions from supernovas could have increased atmospheric ionization by a factor of 50; this would have greatly increased the likelihood of cloud-to-ground lightning, which in turn could have sparked more wildfires, Melott said.

While the scientists could not calculate precisely how many additional lightning events would result from a 50-fold boost in ionization, "the potential is there for a large increase," they wrote in the study.

Today, most wildfires are caused by human actions; before that, "lightning was the single biggest cause of wildfires," Melott explained. Forests scorched by wildfires would give way to grasslands; more open savanna meant more walking from tree to tree, which would then put evolutionary pressure on human relatives to spend more time on two legs.

Yet hominins were already becoming upright walkers long before the supernova activity peaked, William Harcourt-Smith, an assistant professor of paleoanthropology with Lehman College at The City University of New York, told Live Science in an email.

The first evidence for bipedalism in ancient humans dates to approximately 7 million years ago, and the transition to full bipedalism was well underway by around 4.4 million years ago, said Harcourt-Smith, who was not involved in the study.

"By 3.6 million years ago, we have proficient bipeds, like 'Lucy,' and by 1.6 million years ago, [we have] obligate bipeds very similar to us," he explained.

Bipedalism was energy efficient, freed up hands for carrying, and offered improved visibility of faraway predators or resources. The shift to fully upright walking "most certainly relates to the opening up of grassland habitats and adapting to this kind of environment," Harcourt-Smith said. Yet the study does not provide compelling geologic evidence of wildfires as the main cause for those dramatic changes in Africa's ancient habitats, he said.

What's more, the destructive power and scope of those hypothetical wildfires hinges on a significant increase in lightning as a result of the supernovas, a variable that the researchers were "unable to estimate," they wrote in the study.

The findings were published online today (May 28) in The Journal of Geology.

• Image Gallery: Prehuman Species Sheds Light on Bipedalism
• 15 Amazing Images of Stars
• See Images of Our Closest Human Ancestor

Originally published on Live Science.

When Benjamin Franklin tied a key to a kite and flew it into a lightning storm, he briefly became an appliance plugged into the strongest power generator on Earth.

Franklin knew, as most people do, that thunderstorms are incredibly powerful. Researchers have tried to estimate precisely how powerful for more than a century, but have always come up short — even the most sophisticated airborne sensors are inadequate because thunderclouds are just too big and unpredictable to measure.

Now, in a paper published Mar. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers in Ooty, India, have come up with a shocking new answer — thanks to a little help from some cosmic rays. [Electric Earth: Stunning Images of Lightning]

Using an array of sensors designed to measure electric fields and the intensity of muons — heavy particles that constantly rain down from Earth's upper atmosphere, decaying as they pass through matter — the team measured the voltage of a large thundercloud that rolled over Ooty for 18 minutes on Dec. 1, 2014. The researchers found that, on average, the cloud was charged with about 1.3 gigavolts of electricity, which is 1.3 times 10^9 volts — roughly 10 million times more voltage than is supplied by a typical power outlet in North America.

"This explains why thunderclouds are so destructive," study co-author Sunil Gupta, a cosmic ray researcher at India's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, told Live Science. "If you dissipate this massive amount of energy through anything, it is going to cause severe devastation."

It's raining muons

Gupta and his colleagues primarily study muons — electron-like particles that are created when cosmic rays bash into various atoms in Earth's atmosphere. These particles have about half the spin of electrons but 200 times the weight, and are very good at penetrating matter. A muon raining down from the atmosphere can travel deep into the ocean or miles underground in just a fraction of a second, as long as it has enough energy.

Muons lose their energy when something gets in their way — say, a pyramid, for example. In early 2018, scientists discovered two previously unknown chambers inside the Great Pyramid of Giza by setting up muon detectors around the structure and measuring where the particles lost (and didn't lose) energy. Muons passing through the pyramid's stone walls lost more energy than muons passing through the large, empty chambers. The results allowed the researchers to create a new map of the pyramid's interior without setting foot inside of it.

Gupta and his colleagues used a similar method to map the energy inside the Ooty thundercloud. Instead of contending with stone, however, muons falling through the cloud faced a turbulent electric field.

"Thunderstorms have a positively charged layer on top and a negatively charged layer on bottom," Gupta said. "If a positively charged muon hits the cloud as it rains down from the upper atmosphere, it's going to be repelled and lose energy." [Infographic: How Lightning Works]

Using an array of muon-detecting sensors and four electric field monitors spread over several miles, the researchers measured the average drop in energy between muons that passed through the thundercloud and those that didn't pass through it. From this energy loss, the team was able to calculate how much electric potential the particles had passed through in the thunder cloud.

It was massive.

"Scientists estimated that thunderclouds could have gigavolt potential in the 1920s," Gupta said, "But it was never proven — until now."

Mapping the thunder

Once the researchers knew the cloud's electric potential, they wanted to go a step further and measure precisely how much power the thundercloud carried as it roared over Ooty.

Using the data from their widely dispersed electric field monitors, the team filled in some important details about the cloud — that is was traveling at roughly 40 mph (60 km/h) at an altitude of 7 miles (11.4 kilometers) above sea level, had an estimated area of 146 square miles (380 square km, an area about six times the size of Manhattan), and reached its maximum electrical potential just 6 minutes after appearing.

Armed with this knowledge, the researchers were finally able to calculate that the thunderstorm carried about 2 gigawatts of power, making this single cloud more powerful than the most powerful nuclear power plants in the world, Gupta said.

"The amount of energy stored here is enough to supply all the power needs of a city like New York City for 26 minutes," Gupta said. "If you could harness it."

With current technology, that's an unlikely prospect, Gupta noted: The amount of energy dissipated by such a storm is so high that it would probably melt any conductor.

Still, the violently powerful potential of thunderstorms could help settle a cosmic mystery that scientists like Gupta and his colleagues have asked for decades: Why do satellites sometimes detect high-energy gamma rays blasting out of Earth's atmosphere, when they should be raining down from space?

According to Gupta, if thunderstorms can indeed create an electric potential greater than one gigavolt, they could also accelerate electrons quickly enough to break apart other atoms in the atmosphere, producing gamma-ray flashes.

This explanation requires more research to verify its accuracy, Gupta said. In the meantime, be sure to marvel at the next thundercloud you see, for it is an unfathomably mighty force of nature — and, please, think twice before flying a kite.

• 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe
• Red Sprite Lightning Revealed in Stunning Photos
• Photos: Most Powerful Storms in the Solar System

Originally published on Live Science.

Two years ago, a lightning storm was responsible for a major reindeer massacre in Norway.

Exactly 323 reindeer, including 70 calves, were felled by the strikes, which caused widespread damage because the electricity was able to course through the wet ground. Shortly after the mass die-off, officials took the reindeers' heads, to test for chronic wasting disease — a nervous-system disease found in deer and elk — but the rest of the bodies were left in the field for nature to take its course.

Now, the headless carcasses are teaching scientists how new life sprouts from a land of death. That's because an area with so much decomposing matter could be fertile grounds for new plant life to grow, a group of Norwegian scientists reported Aug. 15 in the journal Biology Letters.

To document how the reindeer bodies affected the ecosystem, the researchers surveyed the carcass-strewn area for traces of poop from scavenging animals. Their research was part of a self-funded project called "REINCAR," short for both "reindeer carcass" and "reincarnation." And if this sounds like a particularly smelly endeavor to you, it is: The team had to smear menthol cream in their noses to deal with the stench, according to The New York Times.

But rotting stench aside, the researchers found a landscape that's getting ready to sprout new life. Fox and bird feces were scattered around the carcasses, and in the feces of the crows, there were crowberry seeds. [6 Surprising Facts About Reindeer]

Crowberry plants (Empetrum nigrum) are a "keystone species of the alpine tundra," meaning that they play a large role in shaping the ecosystem, and without them, the ecosystem would be very different, the authors wrote in the study. And the carcasses are creating a bare, nutrient-rich soil for such plants to grow in, according to the Times.

As various scavengers drop a mix of crowberry and other seeds around the carcasses, you get "directed seed dispersal to the ideal germination spot," lead author Sam Steyaert, a researcher at the University of South-Eastern Norway and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, told the Times. In other words, the scavengers are delivering the seeds to perfect places for them to grow.

In 21 out of the 24 fecal samples they took from crows, the researchers found viable crowberry seeds, or seeds that could potentially grow into seedlings. And when the team visited the site last week, they saw many crowberry seedlings spurting up around the field, which also now contains grass and sedges, according to the Times.

"Our study provides novel insight into how scavengers may have landscape-level effects on plant distribution," the authors wrote in the study. "Our study took advantage of a rare event."

But not all animals loved this area. The team found that rodent poop was less concentrated around the carcasses compared with in other areas. This could be due to fear or just the dearth of plant life to eat around there, they wrote in the paper.

Originally published on Live Science.