Ball Lightning Created In A Lab
From www.newscientist.com
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 bouncing 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.
READ THE REST AT WWW.NEWSCIENTIST.COM...
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 bouncing 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.
READ THE REST AT WWW.NEWSCIENTIST.COM...
posted by Marie D. Jones at 10:32 AM
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