![]() ![]() If ball lightning turns out to be explainable by science, the findings could revolutionize our understanding of physics. When it comes to ball lightning, there are lots of observations, but “nobody has correlated any of the observations with any other measurements.” “This is one thing that hasn’t been done,” said Martin Uman, a lightning scientist at the University of Florida who is not involved in the research. They’ll compare the accounts with weather radar systems to characterize the factors that could lead to ball lightning. A new website hosted by New Mexico Tech physicist Richard Sonnenfeld and Texas State University engineer Karl Stephan is collecting eyewitness accounts to improve the basic understanding of the phenomenon. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday.īall lightning has been reported for centuries but hasn’t been reliably observed by scientific instruments. “Nobody has correlated any of the observations with any other measurements.” This newsletter rocks. “It’s actually one of the incidents that probably got me interested in lightning in the first place.” Sterpka saw ball lightning again in his twenties while driving near a thunderstorm in Massachusetts. That’s when they heard what the strange sighting may have been: ball lightning. His grandfather had no idea what it was but asked around. ![]() Sterpka told his grandfather, a science teacher, when he returned home. He watched the ball of light float down to the ground in the distance and disappear out of sight in a matter of 5–10 seconds. “I remember this blue, kind of fuzzy ball just sort of descended diagonally out of the clouds,” said Sterpka, who conducts research in lightning physics at the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center. He was home alone and watching a thunderstorm from a window one summer night. So far, at least, none of these ideas can explain everything ball lightning seems to do.Graduate student Christopher Sterpka remembers the first time he saw ball lightning, as a 9- or 10-year-old staying at his grandparents’ house in West Hartford, Conn. A few believe it is a messy tangle of electromagnetic field lines wandering Earth alone. Others think it might be caused by lightning strikes themselves. Some believe the phenomenon’s origins lie in the electrical power play of vast thunderstorms. There are plenty of hypotheses, but little certainty. ![]() Scientists around the world take the phenomenon seriously, while remaining unable to explain, reproduce or authoritatively document it. The most likely explanation is that he witnessed ball lightning, a rare form of atmospheric electricity that can hover gently above the ground inside or outside buildings and even pass through closed windows. He didn’t even have time to be scared.Īndrea Aiello remains fascinated by what he saw as a boy – and now, as a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany, he is developing his own ideas about it. It floated there for about 10 seconds before vanishing as silently as it had come. The ball was dark yellow, completely opaque, with a wispy surface made from layered sheets of slowly rippling light. ![]() Emitting no heat or smell, it hovered about a metre in front of him and slightly over his head. Without warning, a glowing sphere the size of a football suddenly appeared in the corner of the room. ON A summer’s day in the early 1980s, a teenager sat in his bedroom watching an afternoon thunderstorm roll over the seaside landscape near Rome. ![]()
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