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Ball Lightning

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, my sister and I were visiting a neighbor a few houses away from our house. They had three foster children, and one of the girls was my age while the other was my sister's age (8 or 9, at that time). The four of us were standing near the front door; the screen door was closed, but the main door was open (it was summertime). I'm not sure why we were standing there, but given that it was a summer day I think we were probably talking about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go (ride bikes down the street, swim in their pool, etc.).

While we were talking, this big white ball of energy came right in through the screen front door -- I don't know where it came from, because we didn't see it until it came inside. It went right in between us, with my sister and I on one side of it and our two friends on the other. We couldn't see our friends faces through it, and they later told us they couldn't see our faces through it either (it passed by in the air, at approximately our face-level). :shock:

Luckily, we didn't try to touch it -- we didn't know what it was, and to be honest I'm still not sure, but ball lightning seems the most likely explanation. I got no feeling from the ball, as I might have if it were a spirit. I'm glad we didn't touch it, because from what I've read and heard, if it was ball lightning, we could have gotten one hell of a shock. It did seem to sort of have intention or direction -- once it passed us, it moved through the living room, then meandered through the kitchen, through the small laundry room, and then out through the back door (located in the laundry room). I've read that ball lightning often seems to have intent. None of us said anything until it was gone, then it was "What the heck was THAT??!?". :wtf:

Does ball lighting come in various sizes? This one was maybe about the size of a bowling ball, and was definitely spherical in shape.

Also, it wasn't storming the day this happened, but being summer I'm wondering if ball lightning can come from or be a form of heat lightning? It may have stormed later in the day, but I don't remember....but I've remembered the experience for over 20 years!
 
I posted this sometime ago

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... highlight=

this is the relavent bit


'Three weeks ago was driving home from bolton abbey at about 11.30pm, appraoching Menwith Hill and i saw a blue ball of light in a dip in the road about the size of a childrens football. As i approached and slowed down it drifted to the side of the road and followed the car up the next rise and then drifted back into the dip.

As i drove over the next rise i could see 4-5 blue lights in a field off to the right. As i got closer a helicopter flew over and started searching with a very bright search light over these fields. '


when i got near this the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and i felt sick in my stomach.
 
Balls of light

Hello, this is my very first time to send in a message. Just wanted to share, that even though, I"ve never actually seen Ball Lighning before, one evening, while at work, I saw, what I think was an orb>>> and whatever it was, it had "personality!"! I am a security Guard, was patrolling outside {around 2:00 am}, and Ilooked to my right shoulder, and a circle of light {golf ball size}, "walking" beside me. I said outloud "Oh, a Firefly, how pretty", & as soon as I said that, it flew up, about 2 feet. & it Elongated {like a worm}-- and went fron White, to A light neon blue. It flew in a wiggly form like dancing, for abouy 10 -15 seconds, then curled up, then dissapeared. After it left, I had a very Happy Feeling, almosr Exhillarated, and then back to "Normal" again.... If anyone else has experienced this, would like to hear. Thanks.
 
When I was at Junior school (3rd year) there was a cracker of a storm, Me and my sister were watching it out of the first floor window, some of the class where hiding under tables. The teacher let the class off the lesson. Out of the window one of the class said "hey, that's odd!" and pointed out over the playing fields. As I looked you could see a ball of lighting floating towards the school about 6ft from the ground. As it got closer everyone got freaked out and ran to hide. In the next minute the school was struck and the door frame of our classroom split sightly (it was about a foot long and a few millmetres wide).

I never forgotten the unease I felt because I love lighting storms normally.
 
BALL LIGHTENING ENCOUNTER

Hell to All. New to this forum and would like any opinions on this strange episode.

I am now 40 years old. When I was about 13/14, I was sitting in our front room with my Mum, sister and brother, during a thunder storm and watching TV. I noticed that the lightening on the field behind our house was coloured like copper wire, and was getting quite near our house(approx 150/200 metres away). The next thing that happend was a white ball appeared just inside the window in the room ( about 6 feet up ) and slowly came down into at an angle of roughly 45 degrees, got to about 2 feet off the floor, then exploded! The room lit up so much, that it looked like a thousand cameras had been used. We just looked at each other, shocked and mystified as to what had just happened! On mentioning this to family members. they laughed or said we were imagining it. My brother checked the glass and there was a crack in it.

Has anyone else experienced this? I live in Northern England.
 
how freeeaky! :shock: gosh iv never experienced this but its a great post..

ill be interested to see wat ppl who kno wat they r talking about reply :oops:

TTFN
 
My sister had an experience like this about 18 years ago in Reading, Berkshire.
The only difference was that my sister's ball lightning didn't explode - it just moved through the opposite wall with a loud crackling, fizzing sound.
 
Wow, great to hear of another person who has seen this! It looked like white metal, almost like a magicians ball. Do you know the trick where the magician holds up a scarf, and a ball floats on top. Very much like this and so unreal at the time. There was no noise. The room, even the sound from the TV seemed to be silent for those few moments.
 
caz1965"Hell to All"(my quote ain't playing)


Thank You.
 
Great balls of lightning

9 February 2006

If you have ever seen a mysterious ball of lightning chasing a cow or flying through your window during a thunderstorm, take comfort from the fact that you have witnessed a very rare phenomenon. Indeed, ball lightning -- a slow-moving ball of light that is occasionally seen at ground level during storms -- has puzzled scientists for centuries. Now, however, researchers in Israel have built a system that can create lightning balls in the lab. The work may not only help us to understand ball lightning but could even lead to practical applications that make use of these artificial balls (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 045002).

Ball lightning is thought to be a ball of plasma that is formed when a bolt of lightning hits the ground and creates a molten "hot spot". The ball can typically measure 30 centimetres across and can last for a few seconds. Although they are generally created during thunderstorms, Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar from Tel Aviv University in Israel have now been able to make lightning balls in the lab using a "microwave drill".

The device consists of the magnetron from a 600-watt domestic microwave oven and concentrates its power into a volume of just one cubic centimetre. The researchers inject the microwaves though a pointed rod into a solid substrate made from glass, silicon, germanium, alumina or other ceramics. The energy from the microwaves then produces a molten hot spot in the substrate.

What the scientists then do is pull the microwave drill out of the solid, which drags the molten hot spot and creates a hot drop. The drop then becomes a floating fireball that measures about 3 centimetres across and lasts for some tens of milliseconds (see figure). "The fireball looks like a hot jellyfish, quivering and buoyant in the air," says Jerby.

Although the composition of the laboratory fireballs still need to be verified, they seem to contain components of the substrate material in various phases, such as ions, neutral atoms and larger macroscopic particles. This is similar to natural lightning balls, which are thought to contain vaporized mineral grains from the soil that have been kicked into the atmosphere by a lightning strike. Moreover, the lab-produced fireballs appear to combine plasma and chemical oxidation and burning processes. Again, this is similar to naturally produced balls in which the vaporised sand grains are thought to react with oxygen in the air and burn to release light.

"Our ability to generate such fireballs in a simple systematic manner may lead to techniques for synthesizing fireballs from solid materials," explains Jerby. He even hopes that the lab-generated fireballs could be used in practical applications such as coating, deposition, combustion and energy production.
Click to expand...

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/2/6/1
 
:roll: Somebody tell me ì'm wrong,but haven't i seen film of Nikola Tesla sat in a room,all unconcerned,as his home made ball lightning bounces all over? :shock:
 
robbo616 said:
:roll: Somebody tell me ì'm wrong,but haven't i seen film of Nikola Tesla sat in a room,all unconcerned,as his home made ball lightning bounces all over? :shock:
Click to expand...

There's this one of his Colarado lab:

tesla_colorado_lightning.jpg
 
:shock: BONKERS!

Tesla sits,enjoying a cup of tea,reading perhaps a new treatise on ether whilst not ten feet away armageddon is breaking out.


That is style.
 
Ball lightning created in microwave oven

Great balls of lightning

9 February 2006

If you have ever seen a mysterious ball of lightning chasing a cow or flying through your window during a thunderstorm, take comfort from the fact that you have witnessed a very rare phenomenon. Indeed, ball lightning -- a slow-moving ball of light that is occasionally seen at ground level during storms -- has puzzled scientists for centuries. Now, however, researchers in Israel have built a system that can create lightning balls in the lab. The work may not only help us to understand ball lightning but could even lead to practical applications that make use of these artificial balls (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 045002).
Click to expand...

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/2/6
 
I thought I'd seen this sort of stuff before, there's a whole lot of articles on the web about how to create lightning and plasmas in your microwave: for example UNWISE MICROWAVE OVEN EXPERIMENTS Home page Ball Lightning

Don't try this at home folks.

(Though I might try when I finally have to replace the microwave and it doesn't matter if I zap it.)
 
Combining food cooking and experimetation with metals etc can make a real mess...
 
Physicists create great balls of fire
18:13 07 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Amarendra Swarup

Ball lightning – the mysterious slow-moving spheres of light occasionally seen during thunderstorms – has been created in the lab.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University, both in Berlin, have used underwater electrical discharges to generate luminous plasma clouds resembling ball lightning that last for nearly half a second and are up to 20 centimetres across.

They hope that these artificial entities will help them understand the bizarre phenomenon and perhaps even provide insights into the hot plasmas needed for fusion power plants.

You can watch a super-slow-motion video of the ball lightning here (3.7MB AVI).

Ball lightning has puzzled scientists for centuries. Though little reliable data exist, there have been many anecdotal sightings, with people as diverse and famous as Charlemagne, Henry II and the physicist Niels Bohr all claiming to have seen it.

In 1753, Russian scientist Georg Richmann may even have been killed by it while trying to trap lightning, becoming the first recorded person to die while conducting electrical experiments.

Glowing ball
Most accounts describe a hovering, glowing, ball-like object up to 40 centimetres across, ranging in colour from red to yellow to blue and lasting for several seconds or in rare cases even minutes. Many scientists believe ball lightning is a ball of plasma formed when lightning strikes the ground, but the exact mechanism is unclear despite the many theories proposed.

Earlier in 2006, Israeli scientists created plasma balls by using microwaves to vaporise various materials, but Gerd Fussmann and his colleagues used a different approach that they believe comes closer to the natural phenomenon. “It is likely that lightning flashes and water interact to produce ball lightning,” says Fussmann. “We therefore use a short, high-voltage discharge of 5000 volts to vaporise some of the water in a glass tank and create the plasma ball.”

The tank contains two electrodes, one of which is insulated from the surrounding water by a clay tube. The high voltage causes enormous currents of up to 60 amps – over 200 times those needed to cause death – to flow through the water for a fraction of a second. These enter the clay tube, causing the water there to evaporate and a luminous plasma ball - consisting of ionised water molecules - to rise from the surface.

Long-lived
“The balls survive up to 0.3 seconds after the current is switched off – far longer than normal plasmas, which decay away far more quickly,” says Fussmann. For example, the plasmas used in laboratories and nuclear fusion plants decay within milliseconds of the power being switched off.

Despite the bright glow, the balls also appear to be rather cold, much like neon lights. A sheet of paper placed above them is lifted but does not catch fire.

Fussmann is now examining the light emission spectrum of the balls and plans to test whether their size and lifespan is affected by the voltage size. Learning to control plasma in this way might help in the development of better fusion power plants that generate energy by burning massive plasma balls of hydrogen.

To determine exactly what happens when ball lightning occurs naturally, he hopes to compare the properties of his ball lightning with existing theories about where it comes from.

Dusty plasma
One theory is that the persistent glow is produced by dusty plasma, generated by lightning striking the ground, melting it locally and ejecting fine nano-particles of sand into the atmosphere.

John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, who proposed this theory, says that the luminosity produced by Fussmann’s lightning could be the result of clay and metal from the electrode being vaporised, leading to a glowing dusty suspension of fine particles.

Fussmann disagrees. “Preliminary results indicate the cloud contains mostly ionised hydrogen and oxygen,” he says. “While there are traces of copper, these are negligible.”

Other physicists are cautious. “The results seem a step forward though not a breakthrough yet,” says Eli Jerby at Tel Aviv University, Israel, who produced the microwave-generated ball lightning earlier this year. “However, they need to be reviewed by other scientists to evaluate correctly their originality and importance.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9 ... ref=dn9293
Click to expand...
 
Lightning balls created in the lab
10 January 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.Hazel Muir


Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here.

Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground.

One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing.

One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang.

A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen.

To test this idea, a team led by Antônio Pavão and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon.

The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. "The luminous balls seem to be alive," says Pavão. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavão's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans.

These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls, but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off.

"The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves," says Pavão, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. "It made my year when I heard about it," he says. "The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning."

Pavão's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds.

http://tinyurl.com/yn54xj
Click to expand...
video clip on page
 
Here's my ball lightning sighting:

It was around May or June of 1998 in Oklahoma City. We were getting one of our usual massive thunderstorms that regularly crop up around that time of the year. I was standing out on my house's covered porch with my cousin, who had come in from Houstin to visit, watching the pyrotechnics when, suddenly, it seemed like someone turned on a strobe light right behind us. I turned around to see a ball of brilliant, blue-white light about the size of a ping pong ball nestled in the 'Y' of the elm tree in the backyard. My cousin and I caught a few seconds of it before it promptly winked out of existence in what I can only describe as an increasingly rapid, and brighter, series of strobes.
 
Ball lightning 'may explain UFOs'
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Some UFO sightings could be explained by ball lightning and other atmospheric phenomena, claims Australian astrophysicist Stephen Hughes.

The scientist has made a detailed study of an unusual event in 2006 when large meteors were observed over Brisbane.
Their appearance occurred at the same time as a brilliant green object was seen to roll over nearby mountains.

Dr Hughes has put forward a theory linking the object - presumed to be ball lighting - to the fireballs.
His idea is that one of the fireballs may have momentarily triggered an electrical connection between the upper atmosphere and the ground, providing energy for the ball lightning to appear above the hills.
He has written up his explanation in a journal of the Royal Society.

Dr Hughes says the extraordinary episode, which occurred during a night of fine weather, is just the sort of happening that might lead some to think they had witnessed UFO activity.
"If you put together inexplicable atmospheric phenomena, maybe of an electrical nature, with human psychology and the desire to see something - that could explain a lot of these UFO sightings," he told BBC News.

The scientist, who is a senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, initiated the study after being called in by the local TV station to look over and explain photos of the fireballs captured by members of the public on camera phones.

Fireballs are exceptionally bright meteors and are produced by fragments of space rock larger than the sand-grain-sized particles responsible for shooting stars; but like shooting stars they cross the sky at great speed.

It seems at least three individual fireballs were seen on the night of 16 May 2006.
A subsequent survey organised by the university brought forward many more eyewitnesses, including a farmer who recalled seeing a luminous green ball rolling down a slope of the Great Divide, a mountainous ridge about 120km west of Brisbane.
This object described as being about 30cm in diameter appeared to jump over some rocks and follow the path of a metal fence for "some minutes". The farmer said he saw the green object come into view just after a fireball had passed overhead.
He thought at first he was witnessing a plane crash and called the police, but a search the following day found no wreckage.

Ball lightning seems an obvious explanation, says Dr Hughes. These bright, hovering spheres of light are not fully understood. They are known to be associated with thunderstorms, but not always, and there was certainly no electrical storm activity in the vicinity of the Great Divide.

Dr Hughes does not offer a new explanation for the causes of ball lightning, merely how enough energy might have been put into the ground to trigger it.
He proposes that the natural flow of current that exists between the upper-most reaches of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, and the ground was increased by the passage of the meteor that streamed charged particles and other conductive materials in its wake.

"Could it be that the meteor descending through the atmosphere, having passed through the ionosphere, actually created a transient conductive connection between the ionosphere and the ground, even if it was only for a few seconds? Was that enough to put charge into the ground, and then with the discharge form some kind of plasma ball above?

"Think of the ionosphere and the ground as the terminals on the battery and you put a wire between those two terminals and current flows, and literally you get a spark."

Other scientists have suggested that charges dissipating through the ground can create balls of glowing ionised gas above it.

Dr John Abrahamson from the University of Canterbury, NZ, championed the idea 10 years ago that ball lightning consisted of vaporised mineral grains kicked out of the soil by a conventional lightning strike, an idea later tested with some success by Brazilian researchers.
He described Dr Hughes' work as "relatively feasible" and something which made "interesting connections".
"There's a long way to go before everyone will be happy and satisfied that we have a full solution," he told BBC News.

Dr Hughes said his publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences was intended to start a debate.
"It's not a vigorous theory; it's more a suggestion that may be worth exploring," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11877842
 
Further Insight into the Nature of Ball-Lightning-Like Atmospheric Pressure Plasmoids

David M. Friday , Peter B. Broughton , Tanner A. Lee , Garrett A. Schutz , Jeremiah N. Betz , and C. Michael Lindsay *

Department of Chemistry, United States Air Force Academy, USAF Academy, Colorado 80840, United States

J. Phys. Chem. A, Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/jp400001y
Publication Date (Web): June 14, 2013

Abstract

Known since antiquity, ball lightning is a natural, long-lived plasma-like phenomenon associated with thunderstorms and is not well understood due to its rarity and unpredictability. A recently discovered laboratory phenomenon with striking similarity to ball lightning is observed when a high-power spark is discharged from a cathode protruding from a grounded electrolyte solution. Whereas several investigations of these long-lived plasmas have been reported over the past decade, the underlying chemical and physical processes are still unknown. The present work attempts to gain further insight into this phenomenon by examining the effect of electrolyte pH on the plasmoid and observing the chemical and physical structure of the plasmoid using high-speed schlieren videography and FTIR absorption spectroscopy. The results indicate that the lifetime and size of the plasmoid slightly increase as the pH of isoohmic electrolyte solutions deviate from neutrality. The observed absorption spectra of the plasmoids exhibit absorption cross sections in the 620–700, 1500–1560, 2280–2390, and 3650–4000 cm–1 ranges, the last attributed to the presence of water clusters. Finally, schlieren images revealed a single, sharp density gradient at the boundary layer of the top and sides of the expanding ball-shaped plasmoid, and turbulent mixing below the ball.

SOURCE (with more expansive text available):

http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/pre ... /jp400001y
Click to expand...
 
people may like to read David Hambling's article on ball lightning - incl artificial ball lightning production as researched by the the US military (among others) It's a little dated now, 2002, and published in an obscure journal, but well worth checking out :

forteantimes.com/features/ar ... _ufos.html
Link is obsolete. The MIA article - once hosted on the now-defunct FT online articles archive - can still be accessed vis the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2005121...rteantimes.com/articles/163_ballsoffire.shtml
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ball lightning captured in the lab

US researchers have developed a new way to create glowing orbs of plasma similar to ball lightning in the lab, allowing them to study their chemical and physical properties. The work could help scientists unravel the mysteries of this very rare natural phenomenon.

Ball lightning has been known for millennia, but its rarity and short lived nature – typically lasting between 1 and 10 seconds – has prevented it from being studied and understood. In recent years, however, lab experiments that mimic ball lightning have been developed.

One method involves a glowing discharge produced above an aqueous electrolyte solution. However, high pressure partially ionised plasmas made this way usually only lasted for milliseconds. Now, Mike Lindsay and colleagues at the US Air Force Academy have found that altering the acidity of the electrolyte solution can produce balls that last for up to 0.61 seconds, creating an opportunity to better understand them.

'It is remarkable that you can have these charges separated in a relatively stable way for relatively long periods of time,' says Lindsay. 'The fact we can increase it from milliseconds to seconds – that's three orders of magnitude – and if one understood this further perhaps this could turn into something more substantial and usable.'

By using high-speed video cameras and infrared absorption spectroscopy the team were able to investigate the internal density and structure of such plasmoids for the first time. They found that ionised water clusters appear to be the main source of the plasma.

'There have been several previous papers on this type of plasma phenomenon, but this paper gives more details and confirms the previous reports,' comments John Lowke, who investigates ball lightning at CSIRO in Sydney, Australia. 'There is at least one observation claimed to be ball lightning that I know of, for which the present experiment would be an explanation.'

However, Lowke says the work does not explain many observations of ball lightning, including reports of seeing it pass through windows and existing inside aeroplanes. 'Most reports of ball lightning have the balls drifting above the ground, but not rising like a hot air balloon, and being quite separate of any liquid or electrolyte.'

Lindsay agrees that the lab-based phenomenon cannot explain all ball lightning observed in nature. He suggests that instead of ball lightning being one particular phenomenon it's more likely to be a series of phenomena that appear similar but are chemically and physically distinct.

The researchers are now looking at ways of extending the lifetime of the plasma and to increase the resolution and sensitivity of the spectroscopy. 'That should allow us to pinpoint exactly what molecular species are present in the plasma and then we should be able to map out its chemistry.'
Click to expand...

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/ ... lab-plasma
 
Natural ball lightning probed for the first time


Goodness gracious, a great ball of lightning seen in China offers the first evidence in nature that the elusive glowing orbs form thanks to vaporised dirt.

Anecdotes about ball lightning stretch back for centuries, but the phenomenon has been hard to study as the balls are unpredictable – and when they do materialise, they last for mere seconds. Lacking detailed observations, explanations have ranged from electrically charged meteorites to hallucinations induced by magnetism during storms.

In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event. When a bolt struck the ground, a glowing ball about 5 metres wide rose up and travelled about 15 metres, disappearing after 1.6 seconds.

The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Gold dust

Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there's also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

The study authors say that other mechanisms could also explain their observations. But Abrahamson thinks the findings are a perfect fit for the soil hypothesis. "Here's an observation which has all the hallmarks of our theory. This is gold dust as far as confirmation goes," he says.
Click to expand...
 
At the rate we're going, all the Strange Phenomena will soon be explained!

(And then what will we do? :( )
 
Ball lightning captured on film and spectrograph

"(Phys.org) —Researchers in China have captured, for the first time, an instance of ball lightning, on digital video along with spectrographs. The accidental capture, detailed by the team in a paper they've had published in Physical Review Letters, offers proof that ball lightning does exist and because it was captured via spectrographs also, offers clues as to how it came to exist."

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-instance-b ... video.html

Before you get too excited, the actual video hasn't been released (or at least, not on this article, which carries only an older photo from a lab experiment). But it's interesting to know there is finally going to be some field data on these things.
 
Threads merged.

P_M

I'm adding Danforth's new thread to the bumper Ball Lightning thread. Research into this phenomena seems to be moving at a cracking pace.
 
It's interesting, but I'm sure I've read a number accounts of ball lightening where it lasted quite along time... what they're describing sounds like a quick reaction that's over in a couple of seconds.
 
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