4 ms·
What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting
- cinderelacinder 6mo ago[flagged]
- nomilk 6mo agoThat 7 second video of a small rocket shot into a cloud to induce a lightning strike (about half way down the article) is incredible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BJIiX9_c_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BJIiX9_c_M Any ideas why the lightning strike appears mostly green (and momentarily purple and orange)?
- deepandmeaning 6mo agoI'm imagining it's something related to the copper wire.
- teh_infallible 6mo agoI always wanted to replicate this with a helium balloon and a long, wet string coated with copper filings.
- CamelCaseCondo 6mo agoMaybe just salt water and skip the filings?
- CamperBob2 6mo agoEven better, use hydrogen!
- IAmBroom 5mo agoHydrogen string is notoriously hard to tie knots in.
- batch12 6mo agoYou'd probably need a very large balloon to overcome the weight of the string
- aaron695 6mo ago[dead]
- postalcoder 6mo agoCopper emits a green-blue light in the flame test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsexjcROH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsexjcROH4
- innis226 6mo agoThe surrounding air becomes ionized. Since Earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, and ionized nitrogen often emits a purple glow.
- CGMthrowaway 6mo agoWhy don't we do this on the norm and somehow harness the energy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoPrize is too low. Says it only delivers 38 gallons of gas equivalent energy, assuming no loss which there will be.
- margalabargala 6mo agoThere are some places that are hit by lighting with high regularity where it might make sense. Lightning rods on tall buildings. Somewhere near here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
- j_seigh 6mo agoLighting rods also work by dissipating the local electric potential and reducing the likelihood of a lightning strike. That's why they are pointed, or fractal in the newer ones. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod "and that a considerable electric current can be measured through the conductors as ionization occurs at the point when an electric field is present, such as happens when thunderclouds are overhead." You can get a ground charge even when thunderclouds aren't present. It just has to be windy. I've always wondered if it was worth collecting this, say with a field with a grid of interconnected lightning rods in a windy location.
- quinncom 5mo agoIt must have been so fun to be Benjamin Franklin. He installed an electric bell in-line on his first lightning rods so that this increase in electrical potential would cause the bell to ring, signaling that the danger for lightning was increased. You can experience this voltage potential firsthand: take a friend to a hill or somewhere where high‑voltage power lines are nearer to the ground. One person, wearing rubber-soled shoes, stands tall with an arm in the air. The other squats down with both hands on the ground. The standing person uses the non-raised hand to gently touch the sensitive skin of the other person (ear lobe, lips), and they can feel an electric arc.
- metalman 6mo ago[flagged]
- cratermoon 6mo agoNeutrons, neutrinos, photons, Z bosons and Higgs bosons are all neutral particles and carry no charge.
- metalman 6mo agono detectable ELECTRICAL charge, but they do contain "energy", and do attract with other particles, so I am still ABSOLUTLY totaly correct in my statement. "the universe is an energy gradient", and one of the few absolutes
- freehorse 6mo agoTl;dr lightings may be caused by electrons/positrons from outer space hitting a cloud and initiating an "avalanche" of electrons.
- pfdietz 6mo agoCosmic rays are mostly protons, not electrons or positrons. You're mixing up to separate theories in the article.
- nirse 6mo agoWell, the primary particles that hit the atmosphere are mostly protons. They cause avalanche of secondaires that are varied but mostly muons,
- sidewndr46 6mo agoAs others have mentioned you are correct. But Earth's atmosphere has plenty of all forms of matter. A proton can interact with mostly anything and accelerate it. So you can find high energy everything in low earth orbit.
- nephihaha 6mo agoMuch of the time they occur when two weather fronts of different temperatures collide with each other.
- xattt 6mo agoThere’s a video of an EF5 tornado from the last 24-48 hours that shows continuous lightning in the background. There hasn’t been an increase in background cosmic rays, so likely the mechanism for lightning generation is likely a continuum in different scenarios. Cosmic rays are one, but not all.
- aaarrm 6mo agoI tried to find this after reading your comment and the amount of nonsense AI tornado videos is a lot to wade through. Wasn't able to find it.
- fguerraz 6mo agoSo, nothing new? The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now. This magazine…
- JadeNB 6mo ago> So, nothing new? > The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now. > This magazine… I think saying "This magazine…" as if the flaws of Quanta are well understood and agreed may need additional elaboration. If you mean that experts have known this—well, the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself.
- paxcoder 6mo ago[dead]
- fguerraz 6mo agoWell, let's say I just don't understand the popularity of this magazine on HN.
- kami23 6mo agoWhy not explain why you think that? We can't all be perpetually online to have an opinion about a one website that shows up occasionally on this site.
- avazhi 6mo agoNot the guy you’re responding to but Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.
- avazhi 6mo ago> the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world. And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.
- joshikarthikey 6mo ago[flagged]
- nephihaha 6mo agoNever mind this kind of lightning, it gets really interesting when we start to look at ball lightning, which is very real but rarely sighted.
- Tomte 6mo agoAs a child I saw an acted segment about ball lightning in childrens‘ TV, following a person around the house, and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. The thing is spooky as hell.
- sidewndr46 6mo agoAs long as you reject the hypothesis of "ionized matter" ball lightning is completely unexplainable. If you accept that ionized matter is hot and gives off plenty of EM radiation, it's pretty simple.
- JadeNB 6mo agoNot to be flip, but, depending on what "fully" means, we haven't fully understood much of anything about the real world.
- dnnddidiej 6mo agoIt is cool that something so seemingly ordinary is extraordinary.
- echelon 6mo agoWe don't even have an accurate mathematical description of how a single water molecule works. We have so much scientific work to do.
- Sharlin 6mo agoWe don’t even understand friction. Which is one source of static charges, which we thus don’t understand well either. And static charges that somehow accumulate in the clouds cause lightning, which… I think you get the point.
- raulparada 6mo agoIf that new theory turns out to be somewhat right, there'll be something humbling about ancient greeks stories of Zeus sending Hephaestus bolts from ~'heaven/the cosmos' being closer to it than our modern explanations all along
- somedrag 6mo agoThere's a Feynman lecture abput electricity in the atmosphere that is interesting to read alongside this article: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html
- darqis 6mo agoemdash means LLM written article
- cwnyth 6mo agoHere's an em-dash in an article from 2013. https://www.quantamagazine.org/biology-confronts-data-complexity-20131007/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/biology-confronts-data-comple... The presence of an em-dash is not a smoking gun.
- saltyoldman 6mo agoProbably the same thing that causes my fingers to get a small spark when I'm walking in the grocery store holding a cart and touching the shelves.
- avazhi 6mo ago[flagged]
- chermi 6mo agoExplain exactly what's click bait about it? Spell it out like I'm an idiot who found the article quite good for a fairly wide audience.
- avazhi 6mo agoSure. Look at the title. Imagine what you'd expect an article whose title is "What causes lightning?" to say. Now, here's how the article closes: "These features suggest that even as explanations get more comprehensive, the case of how lightning really works will keep getting reopened. “It just gets more and more bizarre the more we look,” Dwyer said. “Clearly our very simple pictures here are really incomplete.” So TLDR, we don't know, we know we don't know, and in fact we anticipate not knowing for quite some time. The article explicitly admits it doesn't know the answer to the question it posed in the title - no, the answer doesn't keep getting more interesting, because we don't have the answer yet. That's clickbait.
- chermi 5mo agoNo. The title has a question mark. And the premise that many people think lightning is a dielectric breakdown from high voltage is accurate (if not those words). Posing it as a question is completely valid because it still is an open question.
- dezsiszabi 6mo agoIs that the purpose of Quanta? To provide new info, new info to who? To you, specifically? Its purpose: https://www.quantamagazine.org/about/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/about/
- avazhi 6mo agoQuanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing where they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world. And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.
- wpollock 6mo agoI found this article interesting but lacking. Lightning also sometimes travels from the ground up to the clouds. Storm clouds produce red sprites (there are some theories about these) and blue jets, that shoot upwards towards space. Then there's ball lightning. None of these phenomena were discussed in the article. I don't think scientists fully understand lightning at all. (At least, I don't!)
- mannanj 5mo agoThe earth is a massive battery, and it loves to exchange electricity with us when we touch it. I think people forget this, and I guess since we have grown up with rubber shows and are of generations that wear shoes even at home, we disconnect ourselves from these free electrons. They are free, and help reduce inflammation and stuff - they are like free antioxidants.