maximus otter
Recovering policeman
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- Aug 9, 2001
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As far as mysteries of nature go, ball lightning is one of the more perplexing. It seems there are as many potential explanations as there are sightings, but in spite of decades of intense interest, none stand out as a clear winner.
One of the weirder hypotheses claims these glowing balls are nothing more than light trapped inside a sphere of thin air. A new paper has added fresh details to the proposal, setting physical parameters on what such a light bubble might be like.
For centuries, people have recorded accounts of grape-fruit-sized orbs of light moving slowly a short distance above the ground, often in the middle of an electrical storm, persisting for maybe 10 seconds or so before silently winking out of existence.
Over a decade ago, Vladimir Torchigin from the Russian Academy of Sciences came to the conclusion that the atmospheric phenomenon we call ball lightning isn't lightning at all, but rather photons ricocheting inside an air-bubble of their own making.
Torchigin's idea is as simple as it is highly speculative. It has nothing to do with charged ions, and everything to do with the intense shower of photons shed by a bright flash inside our atmosphere.
As any particle absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation, there is a recoil referred to as the Abraham-Lorentz force. In theory, light spilling from a lightning strike causes air particles to jiggle as they absorb and transmit electromagnetic radiation.
This force isn't all that impressive under most circumstances, as even Torchigin admits by stating, "[t]hese forces are extremely small for conventional intensities of light, and their action is rightly ignored".
But the extreme intensity of a lightning strike isn't your normal flash. What's more, these optical forces could potentially be magnified considerably under the right conditions.
Those 'right conditions', according to Torchigin, involve the generation of a thin layer of air that refracts the light back in on itself. A thin layer of air – not unlike the film of a bubble – could effectively focus light like a lens, intensifying the light enough to shove air particles into a boundary and produce a long-lived bubble, concentrating photons for seconds at a time.
https://www.sciencealert.com/russia...nce-behind-ball-lightning-as-bubbles-of-light
maximus otter
One of the weirder hypotheses claims these glowing balls are nothing more than light trapped inside a sphere of thin air. A new paper has added fresh details to the proposal, setting physical parameters on what such a light bubble might be like.
For centuries, people have recorded accounts of grape-fruit-sized orbs of light moving slowly a short distance above the ground, often in the middle of an electrical storm, persisting for maybe 10 seconds or so before silently winking out of existence.
Over a decade ago, Vladimir Torchigin from the Russian Academy of Sciences came to the conclusion that the atmospheric phenomenon we call ball lightning isn't lightning at all, but rather photons ricocheting inside an air-bubble of their own making.
Torchigin's idea is as simple as it is highly speculative. It has nothing to do with charged ions, and everything to do with the intense shower of photons shed by a bright flash inside our atmosphere.
As any particle absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation, there is a recoil referred to as the Abraham-Lorentz force. In theory, light spilling from a lightning strike causes air particles to jiggle as they absorb and transmit electromagnetic radiation.
This force isn't all that impressive under most circumstances, as even Torchigin admits by stating, "[t]hese forces are extremely small for conventional intensities of light, and their action is rightly ignored".
But the extreme intensity of a lightning strike isn't your normal flash. What's more, these optical forces could potentially be magnified considerably under the right conditions.
Those 'right conditions', according to Torchigin, involve the generation of a thin layer of air that refracts the light back in on itself. A thin layer of air – not unlike the film of a bubble – could effectively focus light like a lens, intensifying the light enough to shove air particles into a boundary and produce a long-lived bubble, concentrating photons for seconds at a time.
https://www.sciencealert.com/russia...nce-behind-ball-lightning-as-bubbles-of-light
maximus otter
