The shocking mystery of lightning explained

Learn about lightning with Daniel and Jorge

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
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 with the stars, you might want to remember
that the stars they can kill you. The stars that
are billions 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

(00:29):
actual stars caused the death of about a hundred people
a year, mostly men. It turns out mostly men. Is
it 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 more Hamming cartoon is and

(01:00):
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 physicist,
but I haven't killed anybody. Is that how you introduce yourself?

(01:21):
Every time? Hi, I'm Daniel and today. I haven't killed anybody.
Day ain't over yet, right now. That's how I introduced
myself to my my girlfriend's father that you know my
girlfriend now wife's father. I'm a particle physicist. Don't worry,
I haven't killed anybody now. Actually he's a he's also
a physicist. So as soon as he heard that I
was a physicist, he was like, this is the one. Well,

(01:42):
welcome to an electrifying episode of Daniel and Jorge Explained
the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio. That's right,
in which we try to unmask the mysteries of physics
out there in the universe and right here on Earth.
Let's try we try to uncover the shocking truth about
the world around you, and uh try to do it

(02:02):
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, um, 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

(02:23):
everybody curious. Since you're a little kid, you're 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 be on
the program, we are going to be talking about lightning.

(02:48):
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 ulture is seeing things that are obviously weird, fascinating,
amazing the humans used to describe using religion, right, or mythology,

(03:08):
and then science slowly sort of pieces that 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 the 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

(03:29):
bit of 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, write I mean,
not just because it strikes the earth, but you know,
it's like it's seeing this giant column of light in

(03:50):
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 such an impressive display,
you know, and it is impressive, you know, like a

(04:11):
single lightning strike has a billion jewels of energy in it,
a billion, right and billion once one lightning strike a
billion jewels. Yeah, And how much is that relative to like, um,
a light bulb? Yeah, well, you know, to calibrate, you
and your household probably use about thirty seven billion jewels

(04:33):
a year, So in a week your house uses a
little less than a billion jewels of energy. So 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.
So 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

(04:55):
his punch has is about a four hundred jewels. So
you know, a normal person's punches, 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

(05:16):
pretty serious stuff. Yeah, so it's something that it's been
in mythology for a long time, and it's it seems
like that it's 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. Um. But
I was wondering, you know, what do people know about lightning?

(05:38):
Is people? Do people think lightning as well understood? Does
everybody out there have a good model for lightning in
their head or most people still just like awe inspired
and dumb struck and have no idea what's causing it. So,
as usual, Daniel went out and asked people on the
street or sometimes at reports 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

(05:59):
the world 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 on the street what lighting was,
what would you answer. Here's what people had to say.
I just know it's like a ray of like of

(06:21):
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
they're moving for one place to another. Um you know,
usually you see it between clouds in the sky. Has
something to do with like a static electrics trusty charge.

(06:42):
I think that builds up as maybe the water molecules
are moving in the cloud. I don't think something like that.
It's a charge difference between the ground of the clouds.
It's like the spontaneous ionization of air like excitement of
park like protons and the clouds, and then this like
a tracer beam to the ground and once being instaground

(07:03):
and lightningtially strikes to know. Yeah, lightning is just the
breakdown of gas or ionizing of gas and allowing electrons
to float through 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 what is it?
And I guess they get inspired or google a little

(07:24):
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
were like, oh, it's a charge and electricity and clouds
and ground. Yeah, And 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.

(07:47):
So that was pretty impressive. What do you think that
comes from? Do you think, um, you know, kids TV
explains lightning or people something that maybe in high school
people here 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's it makes people wonder and they want answers. I

(08:10):
think the good news is that nobody said Zeus throwing
down and bolts. I thought you were a favor of
mysticism and magic, right, so now now you're cheering physics
on for destroying the old gods mooney or something. Uh.
I think it's interesting, um that you said earlier, most

(08:35):
lightning strikes are happened to hid men. Yeah, that's right.
About a hundred people every year are killed by lightning,
and eight out of a hundred are men. I think
that is really quite fascinating. Um. Yeah, what what used
to that? It's so that 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,

(08:58):
the volume of their hair, or or 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 where they're doing
stupid stuff in lightning storms more. That sounds about right,
Or I think this is just proved that maybe Zeus

(09:19):
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 in other areas where it's
really common. It's just where it happens more, not just

(09:41):
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
um the universe punishing Florida for it's roll into political
for having a bunch of weird dudes in it, right,

(10:02):
And that's because of the weather. There's just more weather
activity over those places. Or you need wide open fields
what 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, and so
you have the conditions to spark lightning more often than
you do in other drier places. So let's break it down. Well,

(10:25):
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 that lightning is fire, right, But
it's not. Lightning is electricity, right, it's it's actually a
glowing tube of plasma. Remember the states of matter. You
have solid liquid gas, and then plasma, the least often

(10:46):
discussed state of matter. That's a gas 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 the gas that conducts electricity usually glows.
That's like what's inside fluorescent light bulbs. The atoms break down,
they like, they just have so much energy they break apart.

(11:08):
The atoms exactly. The electrons have been torn off of
the positive nuclei and plasma is not so weird. They
can't stay start 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.

(11:31):
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 electricity, it's an insulator, right. But
if you get enough positive charges on one side and
negative charges on the other side, then the force is
so strong that that it breaks apart the atoms and

(11:51):
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 is vibrating and when it's
vibrating has so much energy. It's also giving off light. Right.
It's a it's getting that energy and then it's trying
to emit that energy. That's what the glow is. The

(12:12):
ions haven't lost all of their electrons, right, They also
absorbed 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?
What are you? How do 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,

(12:32):
it's actually really fascinating how it happens. You have a
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 like the step structure,

(12:53):
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

(13:13):
see and 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
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,

(13:34):
there's this huge opportunity, right, you have this 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 to the ground, up to
the cloud like half the speed of light. You're saying

(13:54):
that the glow starts from the ground, but actually, but
the whole thing is it's a it's a trons 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

(14:18):
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 plasma ification 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 is always trying to flow down to the ground.

(14:38):
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.
We're 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 gonna 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.

(15:00):
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 then the rushing of the electrons
happens first at the ground, and then the rushing kind
of propagates up. And so that's why, like, if you
look at high speed high speed movie of lightning, it
looks like it's actually moving up from the ground. That's right, exactly,

(15:23):
because when the bottom makes the connection with the electrons
first touched 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
plasmifications start there and then moves very rapidly up to
the clouds. And I only learned this when I actually

(15:43):
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

(16:07):
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. And but then the fusion
reactor wasn't working, and so we thought, well, let's test
it on something else. So the scientist I was working with,
Glenn Wharton, Um he lived in Um. You guys were like,
we need five point one exactly. We're like our our

(16:31):
fusion reactor. We were like, what's 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 to fifteen, nothing and then all of a sudden
to twenty or so huge thunderstorm, pouring rain for about
fifteen minutes, and then blue skies again pretty reliably. So

(16:54):
we took the camera to his garage and we set
it up and we just sort of pointed in a
random direction and turned it on and boomed the 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

(17:17):
awesome footage we got, and that was it 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 uh,
that's a lot for particle physics, isn't it? Plasma physics?
And um Interestingly, three of those citations came in the

(17:39):
last few years, so it's gathering some attention. You know,
maybe it's gonna be one of these papers that gets
no citations and then changes the world. Wow. So when
they say of lightning strikes are men, they really just
mean like male physicists think it's a good idea to
go out into the store to take pictures. That's right now.
We were safely ensconced in in his garage. But it

(18:01):
was a pretty awesome experience. I had never seen lightning,
um 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. All right, we talked about what

(18:34):
lightning is. It's essentially 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 many lightning all the time. Like
do you ever get static electricity? You know, you like
rub your feet across carpet um essentially build up a
bunch of charge and then if you touch something, you
feel a little zapp Right, if you look carefully, you

(18:55):
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 door knob, which ionizes the air between there, and
that's what causes this part exactly. And it only happens

(19:15):
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 millimeter

(19:37):
lightning bolts but still 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. You're there's some complicated physics of
the friction there, but basically you're pulling the electrons off

(19:59):
of atoms and building up a charge. So you like
you rub two atoms together and the electrons just fly
off and but don't need 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

(20:22):
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 charge 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

(20:42):
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,

(21:05):
it takes a pretty good amount of of charge just
to get that little zapp from your finger to the
door knob. 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. Um, And then they
went out and they measured it. They shot these rockets

(21:26):
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 in into clouds, you measure pretty
strong electric fields, but not nearly strong enough to create lightning,
not nearly strong enough to to cross this huge gap
of an insulator from the cloud to the ground. Wait,

(21:47):
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.

(22:08):
You would need much more accumulation of electrons to actually
cause the spark exactly. We understand pretty well the physics
of of ionizing gas, right, We know what error is
made out of. We know how the water in their 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

(22:30):
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 and you can see when
does the air breakdown? 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

(22:52):
lightning start. I feel like there's two mysteries here. One is,
you don't really understand We don't really understand what causes
the frick shin two and the rubbing of the to
create the electrons to a bunch up. And also we
don't know what actually makes it come down to earth.
That is that sort of right, there's two mysteries. That's right,

(23:12):
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 pellets are ub up
against each other um, 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

(23:34):
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, is actually a huge amount of
radiation in those clouds, especially X rays lightning strikes. And

(23:58):
people went out there with the like ray sensors and
there's a big amount of X ray. You're gonna say,
X rayometers, X X ray, X ray matics. Yeah, people
hadn't thought to do this right there. People hadn't fought
until very recently. This is like ten years ago. People
hadn't thought to measure like is there radiation inside a thundercloud?

(24:21):
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 admit and give out X rays. The models

(24:42):
of of plasmas 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

(25:08):
um 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 your's atmosphere is

(25:29):
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

(25:51):
is like, you've 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 how happens to hit them?
And said, Ben basically starts the lightning fire. So you're
saying that lightning is caused by something in the heavens.
Oh my gosh, outside of this earth, beyond beyond our

(26:13):
our our existence here. It's not mythological, but it is extraterrestrial. Yes,
that's the theory, right. The amazing thing is an alien
I have on the on the tape here now Daniel
Zeus is an alien mostly killing men. Yes, exactly, that's
physics has taught us. No, we don't know this right.
This is an active area of investigation where the most

(26:35):
amazing thing 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. There's

(26:55):
a huge amount of stuff that we just don't understand
going on inside, and we don't have time to dig
new to it today. But there's 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.

(27:16):
I feel like maybe you guys have the large hadron colliders,
you just like hit the pause button and um, just
for a week, all those three thousand scientists, you 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 multifacet and we've got folks interested
in lightning. We have folks interested in, you know, how

(27:37):
ducks procreate. We got folks interested in the 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, and there's apparently not

(27:57):
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. Um, but
we made, you know, a little bit of progress with
Ben Franklin, and almost no progress since then until about
the seventies. Does that that's the benchmark. Ben Franklin was

(28:18):
a pioneer of lightning research, and nobody else has done.
It's been like on the last couple of decades that
people have really started started to get serious about this
and attack this problem. And that's one of the best
things about science when people like, all right, let's figure
this out. Does this make sense? And and and very
quickly you discover there's mysteries everywhere. Right, there's all sorts

(28:38):
of weird stuff to explore all around the universe and
right here on Earth. Well, that's amazing, um that there
are still so many mysteries about it and how it works.
All right, let's let's go into now lightning not just
here on Earth but in other planets. But first let's
take a quick break. All right, we've talked about lightning

(29:09):
and what causes is and what we don't know about
what causes it. But um, and there are still big
mysteries in lightning. That's crazy, it's it's um. 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

(29:30):
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 haven't been able to
record or verify. And yeah, and one of my first
is just like, um, like people see balls of lightning

(29:50):
in their house and stuff like that. Yes, exactly. This
this continuing series of anecdotal evidence for something called ball lightning,
which is suppos is to be like a glowing ball
of lightning like ten centimeters wide approximately, that they will
like come down people's chimneys and like run around their
house and then go out the window. Um, it's bizarre.

(30:13):
No scientist has ever seen it, 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 if all those people saying, man,
I think it's aliens. They might be right, It might
be super supernovous are not caused by aliens or its

(30:36):
signals from an alien dying star. Yeah. Actually, you know,
I don't know that. I don't know the supernova are
not caused by aliens, So I really shouldn't say that
for certain. It could be um. But you know, ball
lightning is like it's just a mystery. Nobody's really captured it. Um.
Nobody has been able to explain it. People have done
some tests in the lab where they're able to create

(30:57):
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 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 thinking here
in Earth. But you're telling me that there are interesting

(31:18):
questions about lightning and other planets. Yeah, exactly. An awesome
thing about lightning is that'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, and 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

(31:40):
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 similar? Like is it cloud rubbing
against each other and then you know, probably costic grays
causing it to arc. That's the idea of right. Um,

(32:01):
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

(32:21):
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. Um, not scientifically accepted yet, but we
do know what happens on other planets, and I think
that's pretty awesome. Like whether on other planets that's for

(32:43):
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. Um. I also
really like here on Earth, when lightning happens, not just
in your like standard vanilla thunderstorm, right, It can happen
in snow storms. It can happen hurricanes. Yeah, exactly, with

(33:04):
snow storms. Yeah, you get like thunder snow or something.
What's the name for that? You should be I like that.
That sounds like like one of the ThunderCats. Maybe thunder
cats snow, I don't know. Yeah, because you know, all
that needs to happen is you need to get a
charge differential and snow storms, you know, they have these

(33:25):
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 and sends you a proton from
a supernova and boom, you get lightning in a thunderstorm.
Can you can get lightning in a snowstorm, it totally happens.
And then hurricanes it's also there's something weird about that. No,
it's just I mean, a hurricane is just a huge storm.

(33:47):
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 suffering from that hurricane in
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 it's like lightning
between clouds, right, Yeah, mostly that's cloud to cloud lightning,

(34:09):
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

(34:30):
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
founds 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,

(34:51):
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 and cloud to cloud business. Yeah,
that's really forget physics, Daniel going to plow out the
cloud computing. I'm just gonna take one percent of every
lightning strike, you know, and then eventually that I add
up to a huge amount. All right, So that's um,

(35:12):
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 were 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. Um,

(35:34):
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 odd
not just by the flash of light, but by the
mysteries that are inside of that column of me on
natural advertisement. And remember the impetus for that lightning strike

(35:58):
could have happened a billion years ago in the 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.

(36:18):
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 Daniel and
Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
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(36:41):
listen to your favorite shows.