In a stormy Hawaiian sky, in July 2017, stripes of red and blue seemed to meet above a bed of white light.
The cameras on the Gemini North telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea created a stunning picture of the multicolored light show. The National Research Laboratory for Optical-Infrared Astronomy (NOIRLab) launched the photo on Wednesday as the “image of the week”.
The lightning in the image “appears so foreign that it seems to be a special effect,” NOIRLab said. He also released a zoom version.
These colored lightning phenomena are well 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 generally hidden by storm clouds.
According to Peter Michaud, the education and engagement manager for NOIRLab, astronomers in nearby Hilo use the telescope’s cameras to keep track of the unfavorable weather approaching the observatory from a distance. The camera system takes a picture of the sky every 30 seconds.
“We’ve seen a few other cases of similar phenomena, but this was the best example of lightning sprites in the upper atmosphere,” he told Insider.
Red, white and blue
Ordinary white lightning is different from sprites and jets in several key ways. As ordinary lightning strikes between electrically charged air, clouds, and ground during storms, spirits and jets begin in different parts of the sky and head into space. Also, their distinctive shades distinguish them.
Red spirits are ultra-fast explosions of electricity that crack through the upper regions of the atmosphere – between 37 and 80 km (23 and 49 miles) up in 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 a snake snake. These are called carrot sprites.
Stephen Hummel, a specialist in the dark skies at the McDonald Observatory, captured a spectacular image of a jellyfish sprite on a ridge on Mount Locke in Texas last July (below).
(Stephen Hummel)
“Spirits usually appear to the eye as very short, faint, gray structures. You have to look for them to notice them, and I’m often not sure I’ve seen one until I check the camera footage to confirm,” Hummel told Insider. then.
Davis Sentman, who worked as a professor of physics at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, proposed the name “sprite” for the red lightning phenomenon. He said the term is “well-suited to describe their appearance” because the word evokes the lightning nature of the lightning fairy. Sentman died in 2011.
Meanwhile, blue jets are born closer to Earth than red spirits. These cone-shaped electric discharges are also brighter than spirits and explode up from the top of the clouds.
Cloudy peaks can be anywhere 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 planes travel at speeds of over 9.9 km / s.
(GODMOTHER)
Sprites and jets can be seen from space
When ordinary lightning strikes the ground, it tends to release positive electricity that must be balanced with equal energy and charged opposite the other side of the sky. So spirits and jets are the electric discharges that balance the equation – that’s why these colored lightning phenomena appear.
“The stronger 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 captured the evasive blue planes on video for the first time in color in 2015. He saw the planes while filming a storm over the Bay of Bengal in India. The scientists later used the footage as part of a 2017 study.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watch
Morgensen’s remarks “are the most spectacular of their kind,” the study’s authors wrote.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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