Farcical to the uninitiated and heinously
rare to the physicist; scientists in China have observed a rare weather
spectacle known as ball lightning in nature for the first time. A research team
in the Quinhai region was monitoring a thunderstorm in 2012 with video camera
and a spectrometer when they unwittingly recorded the St. Elmo’s Fire (ball
lightning’s colloquialism). In layman’s terms, ball lightning is a large flash
of light that looks circular from afar. It appears during a super cell and can
sometimes emanate from objects like lightning rods or ship masts caught in the
chaos. In a report published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, researchers
at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado last
year figured out how to reproduce ball lightning in the lab. They used
electrodes partially submerged in electrolyte solution to create the high-power
electric sparks. The result was bright white plasmoid balls.
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