Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseLearn about lightning with Daniel and Jorge
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Terms apply. Hey, Jorgey, you like looking up at the stars, right?
Yeah? I love it. The stars are beautiful and brilliant, and it just makes you think about the universe.
Next time you look by the stars, you might want to remember that the stars they can kill you.
The stars that are billis of light years far away can kill me.
That's right. Not just shooting stars, which are like meteors that could hit the earth and kill you, but the actual stars cause the death of about one hundred people a year, mostly men. It turns out who.
Must be men is because they're driving while they're trying to look at the stars.
No, as usual, it turns out it's all about the particles.
Hi I'm Moreha. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I have not killed anybody this year or any other year.
Well, that's good. That's always a good thing to put in your resume.
I like just coming out denying that initially, Like nobody asks you, but I just want you to know I'm a particle businicist, but I haven't killed anybody.
Is that how you introduce yourself every time? Hi, I'm Daniel, and today I haven't killed anybody.
They ain't over yet, right now. That's how I introduced myself to my girlfriend's father, you know my girlfriend now wife's father. Hi, I'm a particle physicist. Don't worry, I haven't killed anybody. No, actually he's also a physicist. So as soon as you heard that I was a physicist, he was like, this is the one.
Well, welcome to an electrifying episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
That's right, in which we try to unmask the mysteries of physics out there in the universe and right here on Earth.
That's right. We try to uncover the shocking truth about the world around you and try to do it all in a quick flash.
That's right. We try to charge up your physics batteries.
And overload your bad joke capacity.
That's right. And today we're talking about a topic which is a particular interest to me and I think of interest to everybody who's looked up at the sky during a thunderstorm.
Yeah, it's something that I think makes everybody curious. Since you're a little kid, you'll probably wonder what is going on with that.
And it's something that people have been wondering about for thousands and thousands of years. You know, it's one of the earliest natural phenomena that inspired religion. You know, people give this power to the gods because it seems so dramatic.
So to the end the program, we are going to be talking about lightning. What is lightning, what causes lightning? And where is the mystery in it? Because apparently there are still unanswered questions about lightning.
That's right. One of my favorite trends in sort of human culture is seeing things that are obviously weird, fascinating, amazing. The humans used to describe using religion, right or mythology, and then science slowly sort of pieces the together the mystery and reveals the physics behind it. You know, Oh, it turns out it's this. It turns out it's that, right. One of the most amazing natural phenomena to witness is lightning. Right. And there's of course a nice long arc of history of understanding lightning. But it turns out that lightning still has a lot of mysteries.
There's still a little bit of a magic and mythology behind it.
Right until physics kills it all.
Until physicists become mythical themselves. Right. Yeah, But lightning, I guess you know, it's such a tangible, you know, phenomenon. It's so visually striking too, right, I mean, not just because it strikes the earth, but you know, it's like you've seen this giant column of light in the middle of a storm. It's just impressive, and it makes you think, man, there must be some kind of deity or god throwing that down.
It certainly is awe inspiring. Right. You look at that and you think, wow, nature or the universe or something out there is so much more powerful than me. It seems like that's an impressive display, you know, And it is impressive, you know, like a single lightning strike has a billion jewels of energy in it, a billion.
Right, and billion one, so one lightning strike a billion jewels. Yeah, and how much is that relative to like a light bulb?
Yeah, well, you know, to calibrate, you and your household probably use about thirty seven billion jewels a year, so in a week, your house uses a little less than a billion jewels of energy. So a billion jewels of energy is like enough to power a house for a week.
Now, is that with my kids using the iPad all the time or not using the iPad?
No?
I stood outside your house for this episode and I measured your house is electricity usage, So this is very specific to you.
I heard the rock the actor his punch is about four hundred jewels, so.
That you know, a normal person's punch is you know, tens of jewels, but like a really strong professional can get to the hundreds of jewels. But you know, that's just hundreds of jewels. That means that a lightning strike is like getting punched by the rock two and a half million times. So pretty serious stuff.
Yeah. So it's something that it's been in mythology for a long time, and it seems like something that signs still hasn't captured quite in a bottle, right, there's still some mysteries about it.
Yeah, it turns out that there's some deep connections between lightning and particle physics, but we'll dig into that. But I was wondering, you know, what do people know about lightning? Is people? Do people think lightning is well understood? Does everybody out there have a good model for lightning in their head or most people still just like awe inspired and dumbstruck and have no idea what's causing it.
So, as usual, Daniel went out and asked people on the street or sometimes at airport if they knew.
I have been doing a lot of traveling this summer, so I've been just taking the opportunity to ask people all around the world or random questions about physics.
So as usual, Daniel went out and asked people in the street did they knew what lightning is and what causes it? So before you hear these answers, think about it for a second. If someone asked you in the street what lightning was, what would you answer. Here's what people had to say.
I just know it's like.
A ray of like of like shooting really fast and then it hits a point.
It's like an energy that hits from one point to another.
Essentially, charge particles moving between differential charge and different positions and are moving from one place to another.
You know. Usually you see it between clouds in the sky.
Has something to do with like a static electric trust be charged.
I think that builds up as maybe the water molecules or moving in the cloud, I know, something like that.
It's a charge difference between the ground and the clouds.
It's like the spontaneous ionization of air.
It's like excitement of park like protons and the clouds, and then like a tracer being to the ground and once the trees are being instaground and light naturally strikes the ground.
Yeah, Lightning is just a breakdown of gas or ionizing of gas and allowing electrons to flow.
Through a high voltages. All right. People had long answers for these.
People have thought about lightning. Lightning is definitely something that's inspired physics thoughts in people's minds. Right. They look at that and they wonder, ooh, what is it? And I guess they get inspired to google a little bit or read about it. But there's some knowledge about lightning out there, for sure. I was impressed.
It seems very more binary than usual. Some people are like, I have no idea. I'm not really sure, but some people are like, oh, it's a chargelectricity and clouds and ground.
Yeah.
In this time, people who have very specific ideas have pretty specific and mostly correct ideas. Right. Didn't get a whole lot of people pontificating totally off topic, so that was pretty impressive.
What do you think that comes from? Do you think, you know, kids TV explains lightning or people something that maybe in high school people hear about.
Yeah, I don't know. I think it has to do with the immediacy of it. Right. Lightning is something that's right there in most people's lives, and so it's not like the Higgs boson or other crazy stuff. It makes people wonder and they want answers.
I think the good news is that nobody said zoos throwing thousand bolts of lightning.
I thought you were a favor of mysticism and magic, right, so now you're cheering physics on for destroying the old gods.
Beside man Mooney or something. I think it's interesting that you said earlier most lightning strikes are happened to hid men.
Yeah, that's right. About one hundred people every year are killed by lightning and eighty out of one hundred are men. I think that is really quite fascinating.
Yeah, welled that that it's so that is so weird.
Yeah. I don't think it has to do with like the physiology of men, or the height of men, or you know, the volume of their hair, or their electrical you know, their capacity to conduct electricity or anything. Might have to do with where men are. You know, maybe they're out more, or they're climbing poles more or something, or they're doing stupid stuff in lightning storms more.
That sounds about right, Or I think does just proved that maybe Zeus is a woman, I think.
All this time, Yeah, I was. I was totally floored by that fact.
That was like.
And the other thing that's interesting is that lightning doesn't just strike men more, but it's not equally distributed around the world. Right. There's some areas around the world where lightning over almost never happens, and other areas where it's really common.
This is just where it happens more, not just where it hits people.
Yeah, just in general, where it strikes the ground, like in Central Africa and in the Himalayas and in Florida, in the US you get a lot of lightning, but in other places, like in Europe, is much much, much less lightning.
I think that's just the universe punishing Florida for its role in the political.
Scene, for having a bunch of weird dudes in it, right.
And that's because of the weather. There's just more weather activity over those places. Or you need wide open fields. What's going on.
Yeah, well, we'll talk about it when we dig into how lightning is formed. But you need just the right weather conditions. Florida, for example, is very moist and has a lot of storms, so you have the conditions to spark lightning more often than you do in other drier places.
So let's break it down. Let's start with what is lightning Like if you had to define lightning, how would you describe it?
Yeah, so lightning. A common misconception is that lightning is fire, right, But it's not. Lightning is electricity, right, It's actually a glowing tube of plasma. Remember the states of matter. You have solid, liquid gas, and then plasma, the least often discussed state of matter. That's a gas where has so much energy that the atoms have become ionized, the electrons have gotten pulled off of the positive nuclei and so it conducts electricity. So it's a gas that conducts electricity and usually glows. That's like what's inside fluorescent light bulbs.
The atoms break down, like they just have so much energy they break apart the atoms exactly.
The electrons have been torn off of the positive nuclei, and plasma is not so weird.
It can't stay stuck to the nucleus.
Yeah, like inside a fluorescent light bulb, that's what you have is a plasma. You have a gas that's been ionized and it's glowing, right, And so that's what lightning is. It's just a long arc of conducting gas, right. Essentially, electricity is flowing through it.
It's just a giant fluorescent tube.
Yeah, it's a giant fluorescent tube. Essentially, the air has been turned into a wire. Right. Normally air doesn't conduct the electricity. It's an insulator, right. But if you got enough positive charges on one side and negative charges on the other side, then the force is so strong that it breaks apart the atoms and turns it into a conductor. And that's what happens with lightning.
The glow that you're seeing the flash. That's just the electricity flowing down this giant fluorescent tube.
Yeah, there's so much energy in there. Stuff's vibrating, and when it's vibrating has so much energy. It's also giving off light. Right, it's getting that energy, and then it's trying to emit that energy. That's what the glow is. The ions haven't lost all of their electrons, right, They also absorb some other energy, and those electrons bounce up and down. When the electrons go down, they give off a photon. So that's what you're seeing. That's the glow from the plasma I see.
But is it like a flow of electrons? What are you How do you think about it? Is it electrons flowing from the clouds to the ground. Is that a good way to think about it.
Yeah, it's actually really fascinating how it happens. You have positive charge on the ground and a negative charge on the bottom of the cloud, all right, So you have this separation, and then the electrons they leave the bottom of the cloud and they explore the air. They move out and they break into these forks. They're like the step structure, and they're looking for a path to the ground. And they when they find the path of least resistance to the ground, the one with where it's easiest to rip the electrons off the atom, right, they make a connection to the ground. Then you basically have this electrical connection and a huge pulse of energy then travels up from the ground to the cloud. And that's what you actually see. You see a bolt of lightning. That's what you're seeing.
You're seeing stuff come up from the ground, not the electrons coming down to the ground.
That's right. What you're seeing is the pulse that goes up. This is this first part of lightning. It's also really quick, but it's much less bright because it's just electrons finding the path. Once they make the connection, then all of a sudden, there's this huge opportunity, right, you have enormous charge difference between the ground and the cloud. It's desperate, desperate to connect, right, And as soon as there's a connection, then it all rushes through there. But it starts where the connection is formed, which is at the ground, and then the pulse goes up up to the cloud at like half the speed of light.
You're saying that the glow starts from the ground, but actually but the whole thing is it's electrons coming down from the cloud to the ground.
That's right. Whenever you have a circuit and you have charges moving, it's always electrons that are moving because they're much lighter than the nuclei, the positively charged nuclei, so it's always about negative charges moving. And in this case, you have electrons flowing down to the ground, right. But the electrons find the path down to the ground, and then the pulse, the actual movement of the electricity starts at the ground and then it works its way back up to the cloud.
You're saying that the plusmification of the air starts at the ground.
Yeah, because that's when that's when the connection is first made. I think about this like the way water always trying to flow down to the ground. So imagine you had like a huge bag of water or something. It's like looking for a hole in the bottom of the bag. It's trying to find its way out, right, or trying to find the weakest spot in the bag and keep pouring water into the bag. And eventually the weakest spot in the bag is going to pop and when that happens, boom, all the water is going to rush out right. Like, that's what happens when you pop a water balloon, right, A water balloon doesn't explode everywhere at once, explodes in one tiny point and then the rest of it follows.
So you're saying, like, as soon as it touches the ground the first electrons, then the rushing of the electrons happens first of the ground, and then the rushing kind of propagates up. And so that's why, like, if you look at high speed a high speed movie of lightning, it looks like it's actually moving up from the ground.
That's right, exactly, because when the bottom makes the connection, when electrons first touch the ground, the top doesn't yet know. Right, No information in the universe travels faster than the speed of light. Nothing is instantaneous. So the connection is first made at the bottom, and the rushing, the glowing, the plasmification starts there and then moves very rapidly up to the clouds. And I only learned this when I actually pointed a high speed camera at a lightning strike.
You said you found this out when you pointed a camera at a lightning Yeah.
One of my first science summer jobs was working with a plasma physics group they're the kind of folks that build fusion reactors, and they would inject fuel into these reactors and wanted to see what happened. So they bought a hugely expensive, super high speed camera that could take like fifteen thousand frame digital pictures a second. At the time, this is in the nineties. That was super duper high tech. But then the fusion reactor wasn't working, and so we thought, oh, let's test it on something else. So the scientist I was working with, Glenn Worden, he lived.
In You guys, were like, we need five point one gigawads exactly. We're like our our fusion reactor, yeah, DeLorean.
We were like, what a good reliable source of plasma? And in northern New Mexico every afternoon there's a thunderstorm. It's crazy. It's like sunny skies at two o'clock, two fifteen, nothing and then all of a sudden two twenty or so huge thunderstorm, pouring rain for about fifteen minutes, and then blue skies again pretty reliably. So we took the camera to his garage and we set it up and we just sort of pointed it in a random direction and turned it on and boomed huge lightning strike right when we turned it on, and we got this incredible footage and you could see the lightning breaking out, stepping down to the ground, and then this huge pulse that went up. And so we wrote a paper science paper that was essentially like, look at this awesome footage we got and that was it.
Wow. Nobody else had done it before.
No, it was the first one as far as I'm aware of. And so we published it and it's got six citations so far.
That's that's a lot for particle physics, isn't it.
It's plasma physics. And interestingly, three of those citations came in the last few years, so it's gathering some attention. You know, maybe it's gonna be one of those right papers that gets no citations and then changes the world. Wow.
So when they say eighty percent of lightning strikes are men, they really just mean like, eighty percent are male physicists who think it's a good idea to go on into the store to take pictures.
That's right. No, we were safely ensconced in his garage. But it was a pretty awesome experience. I had never seen lightning in slow motion. It was pretty exhilarating cool.
That sounds really cool. So that's lightning, and so let's get into what causes lightning, and let's get into where the mystery is that scientists haven't figured out. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we talked about what lightning is. It's essentially a giant fluorescent tube. So it's like a giant it's like the neon sign of nature.
That's right. It's sort of like a giant fluorescent tube, and you can see sort of mini lightning all the time. Like you ever get static electricity, you know, you like rub your feet across carpet, essentially build up a bunch of charge and then if you touch something, you feel a little zapp right, If you look carefully, you can see a little arc of electricity that's sort of like mini lightning from your fingertips, like you are mini Zeus in that case.
And it's the same thing happening, is that electrons from my finger are jumping over to the doorknob, which ionizes the air between there, and that's what causes the spart exactly.
And it only happens when you get close enough because it's easier to ionize a smaller amount of air. Either you can get closer or you can increase the amount of power, and then you get a bigger arc.
So anyone can shoot plasma from their finger.
That's right, yeah, exactly. You might not be as powerful as the rock, but you can shoot lightning bolts from your fingertips.
A little tiny one millimeters lightning bolts, but still, that's right. It's plasma at your fingertips.
And the way that you do that here on Earth, right is like you're rubbing your feet against the carpet. Or you can do this in a demonstration if you take like a glass rod and you rub it with a silk cloth or something and Essentially, what you're doing there is you're stripping electrons. There's some complicated physics of the friction there, but basically you're pulling the electrons off of their atoms and building up a charge.
So like you rub two atoms together and the electrons just fly off, but don't they come back right away.
It depends, right if there's something to separate them. And so in the cloud, people are not exactly sure how this happens, but they think that there's some complex interaction between sort of semi frozen pellets of water and crystals of ice that bump up against each other, and one of them is lighter than the other, and they bump up against each other and then they have different reactions to wind and gravity, and so they get separated, and that's how you get this charred build up inside the cloud. Essentially, it's friction between you know, crystals of ice and semi frozen drops of water.
Okay, wait a minute, you're saying, what do you mean. It's not well understood. We don't know exactly what causes lightning, but we we skipped over that and went straight for the Higgs boson and the mental particles of nature.
Yeah, exactly. It turns out there are huge mysteries right here on Earth. Like people have tried to build models of what's going on inside the cloud, and they think, Okay, if you're going to get lightning, you need to have a huge charge difference, right. I mean, it takes a pretty good amount of charge just to get that little zapp from your finger to the doorknob. Now imagine crossing like five kilometers from the ground to the cloud. You need a huge charge difference, right. So they have some idea about how much this happens and how these things build up, and then they went out and they measured it. They shot these rockets into clouds to measure the electric fields to see, like, are the electric fields actually big enough to make lightning? And they found out that they're not. Right, Like, if you shoot rockets up into clouds, you measure pretty strong electric fields, but not nearly strong enough to create lightning. Not nearly strong enough to cross this huge gap of an insulator from the cloud to the ground.
Wait, so you do get a big accumulation of electrons up in the clouds, but you're saying it's not big enough to cross over to the ground.
Yeah, it shouldn't happen. Lightning shouldn't happen. Like you measure the electric field inside a cloud, there's not enough of an electric field there. The charge difference is not big enough to cause lightning.
You would need much more accumulation of electrons to actually cause the spark exactly.
We understand pretty well the physics of ionizing gas, right, We know what air is made out of, We know how the water in there works. We know how much electricity, how much voltage difference it takes to create an arc, and people can do these studies in the lab. It's not difficult, right. You mix various gases together to simulate air, you add humidity, you can stimulate the situation pretty exactly, and then you can put a charge difference across it and you can see when does the air break down? How much charge difference does it take to create this bolt? And so we know when that happens. And we measure in the cloud and there's not enough charge difference. So we don't understand what makes lightning start.
Feel like, there's two mysteries here. One is you don't really understand. We don't really understand what causes the friction and the rubbing of the to create the electrons to bunch up, and also so we don't know what actually makes it come down to earth. Is that sort of by right? There's two mysteries.
That's right, there's two mysteries there. One is you know what process exactly is causing this charge difference. And people have these models about the way the water pellots rup up against each other and that partially explains it. But there's still mysteries there. But I think the bigger mystery, the more fascinating one, is you know, you measure the electric field, like whether or not you understand how the electric field gets there, you measure it and you see that it's not strong enough to make lightning. So why do we get lightning? Because obviously we get lightning, right.
Obviously it's some old white dude with a white beard throwing it down, striking mortals.
And this is where the particle physics comes in because people discovered that when you get a lightning strike, there's actually a huge amount of radiation in those clouds, especially X.
Rays lightning strikes, and people went out there with the X ray sensors and there's a big amount of X ray.
You were going to say X rayometers, right, X.
X ray meters, X ray omatics.
Yeah, people hadn't thought to do this, right, The people hadn't thought until very recently. This is like ten years ago. People hadn't thought to measure like is there radiation inside a thundercloud? And then they built these devices to measure X rays and other kind of particle radiation, and it turns out there's a huge amount of radiation, especially X ray radiation that's created when there's a lightning strike.
And that's not normal, Like when you have this plasma and you have these ions and all this physics going on, that's not normal to just emit and give out X rays.
The models of plasma do not suggest that you should get this much X rays. So then people thought, well, maybe it's not the lightning that's causing the X rays. Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe something is happening which generates all this radiation and that's what causes the lightning. So one of the ideas people have now is maybe it's particles from space. Right, also known as cosmic rays.
X rays are caused by rays of energy from space.
Yeah, so some star somewhere a jillion years ago goes supernova, flings out a super high energy particle, right, which flies across the universe, enters the Earth's atmosphere. And what happens when a huge high energy particle enters ER's atmosphere is it creates a shower of radiation. Now, if that happens to hit a cloud, this is a theory, right, If that happens to hit a cloud that has a big charge difference, not enough to cause lightning, but a pretty good charge difference, it can give it the kick it needs to spark that lightning.
To push the electrons down into the ground exactly.
That can give them that boost to get sort of over the hump. So the model is like, you got all these clouds, they're primed to spark, right, they don't have enough energy to spark and actually cause lightning, and then a particle from space happens to hit them and ben basically starts the lightning fire.
So you're saying that lightning is caused by thing in the heavens, Oh my gosh, this earth. That's right beyond beyond our existence here.
It's not mythological, but it is extraterrestrial. Yes, that's the theory, right. The amazing thing is.
THEE is an alien. I have you on the on the tape here now, Daniel.
Zeus is an alien mostly killing men. Yes, exactly, that's what physics has taught us. No, we don't know this right, this is an active area of investigation. One of the most amazing things to me is that we still don't understand lightning, Like these are pretty basic questions. Until recently, we didn't realize like there's a lot of radiation inside a cloud, Like an airliner that flies through a thunderstorm is actually exposing its passengers to more radiation, right, because it turns out there's a lot of radiation inside these thunderstorms. Right, There's a huge amount of stuff that we just don't understand going on inside, and we don't have time to dig into to it today. But there's that we're just talking about one kind of lightning, like cloud to ground, this cloud to cloud lightning, this inter cloud lightning. There's all sorts of crazy kinds of lightning like sprites and elves and all sorts of crazy stuff that nobody understands at all.
I feel like maybe you guys at the Large Hadron Collider, so just like hit the pause button and just for a week, all those three thousand scientists should maybe focus on this question first.
That's like thinking that like science can only do one thing at a time, right, you know, science is multi fasted, And we got folks interested in lightning. We have folks interested in, you know, how ducks procreate. We got folks interested in Higgs boson. And one of my favorite things about science is that it's all about people following their passion. Maybe you're really interested in how snails eat other snails, awesome, go study it. You're the right person to do that. And so I think it's good that we got Higgs boson folks doing that and lightning experts doing that.
There's apparently not enough people curious about how lightning works.
Yeah. Probably most people think lightning is solved, right, They think, oh, well, we figured that out a long time ago. But we made you know, a little bit of progress with Ben Franklin, and almost no progress since then until about the seventies.
That's the benchmark. Ben Franklin was a pioneer of lightning research, and nobody else has done no.
It's been like on the last couple of decades, if people have really started to get serious about this and attack this problem. And that's one of the best things about science when people are like, all right, let's figure this out. Does this make sense? And very quickly you discover there's mysteries everywhere. Right, there's all sorts of weird stuff to explore all around the universe, and right here on Earth.
Well, that's amazing that there are still so many mysteries about it and how it works. All right, let's go into now lightning, not just here on Earth but in other planets. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Tackle these situations in stride and y. Of course, be annoyed when planned expense comes up, but not let it be something that slows me down right, And also as I did with repairing my credit, you know, hiring somebody to do credit repair for me. You know, that was a gift that I gave myself that allowed me to then you know, get my first apartment, get you know, my first car under my name, then eventually buy my own home. Like, these are all things that.
Are possible for all of us.
We just have to educate ourselves and put in some of the hard work that it takes to unlearn bad practices we might have, you know, inherited from our family, and then also educate ourselves on the things that we don't know, you know, the information that wasn't passed down to us because our parents weren't educated on these things.
Like a good neighbor State farm?
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All Right, we've talked about lightning and what causes this and what we don't know about what causes it. But and there are still big mysteries in lightning. That's crazy. It's a big news flash for me.
Yeah, And there's all sorts of weird kinds of lightning that people don't understand. And there's sort of two categories. There there's like weird lightning that we've seen, we've verified, but we don't understand like what makes it or what causes it or how it works whatever, sort of like that's serious science. And then there's the sort of crazy lightning stories, right, like things people talk about but no scientists hasn't been able to record or verify and what. Yeah, and one of my.
Things is just like people see boss of lightning in their house and stuff like that.
Yes, exactly. This this continuing series of anecdotal evidence for something called ball lightning, which is supposed to be like a glowing ball of lightning like ten centimeters wide approximately, that will like come down people's chimneys and like run around their house and then go out the window. It's bizarre. No scientist has ever seen this, has never been recorded. We only have anecdotal evidence. But we have a lot of anecdotal evidence. It's like in history in the last few hundred years, there's a lot of examples about people writing about this.
So all those people saying, man, I think it's aliens, they might be right.
Yeah, supernovas are not caused by aliens or.
It's like the signals from an alien dying star.
Yeah. Actually, you know, I don't know that. I don't know that supernova are not caused by aliens, so I really shouldn't say that for certain. It could be. But you know, ball lightning is like it's just a mystery. Nobody's really captured it. Nobody's been able to explain it. People have done some tests in the law where they able to create these weird glowing balls of plasma basically using very special arrangements of moisture and charge whenever, But we don't know if that's really what ball lightning is, and nobody's been able to create it in a way that like lasts as long as people say it does, you know, all.
Right, And so that that's one weird thing here on Earth. But you were telling me that there are interesting questions about lightning and other planets.
Yeah, exactly. An awesome thing about lightning is that it's not unique to Earth. Right. We see weather, of course on other planets, and Saturn and Jupiter in particular. You know, they are these amazing beautiful planets with obvious cloud patterns. You can just look at their surface and see there's a lot of stuff going on there, right, And there's swirling clouds and huge storms, and in those storms we see lightning. So there's extra terrestrial lightning. That's a real thing. But one of the mysteries is like does it happen on other planets?
Yeah? And is it very very similar? Like is it clouds rubbing against each other and then you know, probably cosmic rays causing it to arc.
That's the idea, right. We haven't been able to put probes into those clouds to see if the electric fields are large enough to cause lightning on their own, but it would make sense. I mean, Jupiter is a huge amount of radiation it's producing, and so it would make sense if some of those are also sparked by you know, high energy electrons or protons or something. There's a lively debate also about whether or not there's lightning on Venus, right, Venus has this really thick cloud cover, so we can't see very well into Venus, and people think there should be lightning, and some people claim to have evidence for lightning on Venus, but it's not scientifically accepted yet. But we do know what happens on other planets, and I think that's pretty awesome, Like weather on other planets, that's for some reason that just tickles the physicist in me.
Whether like snow, to feel snow in another planet, that would be cool.
Yeah, that would be cool. I also really like here on Earth when lightning happens, not just in your like standard vanilla thunderstorm, right, It can happen in snowstorms. It can happen hurricanes. Yeah, exactly, Wait, snowstorms. Yeah, you get like thunder snow or something. What's the name for that. You should be able up.
With thunder snow. I like that. That sounds like like one of the ThunderCats.
Maybe ThunderCats snow, I don't know. Yeah, because you know, all that needs to happen is you need to get a charge differential and snowstorms, you know, they have these ice crystals and they can run up against each other and you get the right combination of hail and snow together and you get this charge differential, and then you know, Zeus does his thing. It sends you a proton from a supernova and boom, you get lightning in a thunderstorm. You can get lightning in a snowstorm. It totally happens.
And then hurricanes. It's also is there something weird about that?
No, it's just I mean, a hurricane is just a huge storm. But you know, hurricane is just this awesome wrath of nature. And if you look at it from space, like you know, right now people are suffering from that hurricane on the East coast, but if you look at it from space, you can see lightning flashes all around the hurricane. It just makes it sort of seem like a super hurricane to me.
In those cases, it's like lightning between clouds, right.
Yeah, mostly that's cloud to cloud lightning, and the principle is the same. You know, it's all about this charge differential. Something else that's fascinating about that kind of lightning is you get this big charge differential. The bottom of the cloud is negatively charged, well, the top of the cloud is positively charged. So when the electrons are reaching down to the ground to try to find a path, some other electrons are simultaneously reaching out inside the cloud. So lightning actually starts in both directions, and then if it finds a path to the ground first, you get cloud to ground lightning. But if it find some connection to the positively charged area of the cloud first, then you get inter cloud lightning inside the cloud. So lightning actually starts in two directions at once.
Well, that all just sounds like some kind of internet business model or something. Cloud to cloud, cloud to ground.
That's right. Yeah, that's where the real money is in the cloud to cloud business.
Yeah, that's really forget physics, Daniel, go into cloud to cloud computing.
I'm just going to take one percent of every lightning strike, you know, and then eventually that'll add up to a huge amount.
All right, So that's that's super interesting. I learned a bunch here today about what is lightning and what causes it and all the things we don't know about it.
Yeah, and you know, shout out to those scientists who are shooting rockets up into clouds connected to little wires and not getting struck. But they're doing it so that we can understand how lightning works and we can finally maybe put to rest, you know, one of the mysteries, one of the deepest questions people have about amazing natural phenomena right here on earth.
So thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed that, and we hope that the next time you get to see some lightning you will look at and get od not just by the flash of light, but by the mysteries that are in side of that column of meon natural advertisement.
And remember the impetus for that lightning strike could have happened a billion years ago in a star.
Far far away, came down to Earth just for you to see it. All right, Thank you for listening, See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environment to impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last sustainability to learn more.
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