In a stormy Hawaiian sky in July 2017, streaks of red and blue lightning seemed to gather over a bed of white light.
The cameras of the Gemini North telescope at Mauna Kea’s Gemini Observatory made a stunning picture of the multicolored light spectacle. The National Astronomical Research Laboratory with icalptic Infrared (NOIRLab) released the photo on Wednesday as an “image of the week.”
The flash of the image “appears so otherworldly that it seems to be a special effect,” NOIRLab said. He also released a zoomable version.
These colored lightning phenomena are aptly known as red sprites and blue jets. They are extremely difficult to capture on camera: flashes last only tenths of a second and can be difficult to see from the ground, as they are usually obscured by storm clouds.
According to Peter Michaud, head of education and collaboration at NOIRLab, astronomers at nearby Hilo use the telescope’s cameras to remotely track bad weather that is occurring near the observatory. The camera system takes a picture of the sky every 30 seconds.
“We’ve seen a few other cases of similar phenomena, but that was the best example of a lightning sprite in the upper atmosphere,” he told Insider.
Red, white and blue
Regular white lightning is different from sprites and jets in several key ways. While regular lightning strikes between electrically charged air, clouds and the ground during storms, sprites and jets start in different places in the sky and move into space. Their distinctive nuances also differentiate them.
Red sprites are bursts of ultrafast electricity that cross the upper regions of the atmosphere (between 37 and 80 km into the sky) and move into space. Some sprites are jellyfish-shaped, while others, such as the one in the Gemini Observatory image, are vertical columns of red light with zigzags meandering downward. They are called carrot sprites.
Stephen Hummel, a dark sky specialist at the McDonald Observatory, last July captured (below) a spectacular image of jellyfish spikes from a ridge on Mount Locke, Texas.
(Stephen Hummel)
“Sprites usually appear in plain sight as very short, faint, gray structures. You have to look for them to detect them, and I’m often not sure to see them until you check the camera images to confirm them.” , Hummel told Insider at the time.
Davis Sentman, who worked as a professor of physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, proposed the name “sprite” for the red lightning phenomenon. He said the term was “very appropriate to describe its appearance,” as the word evokes the fairy and fulminating nature of lightning. Sentman died in 2011.
Meanwhile, blue rays are born closer to Earth than red sprites. These cone-shaped electric shocks are also brighter than sprites and explode upward from the tops of the clouds.
Thunderstorm cloud tops can sit from 22 km above the earth’s surface; the blue jets continue to move into the sky until they reach a height of about 48 km, at which point they disappear. These jets move at speeds of more than 9.9 km / s.
(NASA)
Sprites and jets can be seen from space
When a regular lightning strikes the ground, it tends to release positive electrical energy that needs to be balanced with an equal and charged energy opposite anywhere else in the sky. So sprites and jets are the electrical discharges that balance the equation; that is why these lightning colors occur.
“The more powerful the storm and the more lightning it produces, the more likely it is to produce a sprite,” Hummel said.
Astronauts can sometimes observe sprites and jets from the International Space Station, 402 km (249 miles) above Earth.
European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Morgensen first captured dodging blue rays on video in color in 2015. He saw the rays as he filmed a storm over the Bay of Bengal in India. Later, the scientists used the images as part of a 2017 study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watch
The study’s authors wrote that Morgensen’s observations “are the most spectacular of their kind.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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