Later, some blamed the entire incident on two people who had been playing cards in the pew during the sermon, thereby incurring God's wrath.[1]. A third man was killed by contact with the third ball. Several hypotheses have been advanced since the phenomenon was brought into the scientific realm by the English physician and electrical researcher William Snow Harris in 1843,[61] and French Academy scientist François Arago in 1855. Seward, Clint. "The new results shed light on the ball lightning enigma and provide valuable information about its initiation, evolution and properties," Jerby told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. Scientists have long attempted to produce ball lightning in laboratory experiments. A. Meessen presented a theory at the 10th International Symposium on Ball Lightning (June 21–27, 2010, Kaliningrad, Russia) explaining all known properties of ball lightning in terms of collective oscillations of free electrons. There was probably a visiting delegation from the clouds, to the captives of the dynamos on last Monday night, and they certainly had a fine visit and a roystering game of romp. Julio Rubinstein,[75] David Finkelstein, and James R. Powell proposed that ball lightning is a detached St. Elmo's fire (1964–1970). British occultist Aleister Crowley reported witnessing what he referred to as "globular electricity" during a thunderstorm on Lake Pasquaney[21] in New Hampshire, United States, in 1916. [60][63][64] Videos and spectrographs of this experiment have been made available. Descriptions of ball lightning appear in a variety of accounts over the centuries and have received much attention from scientists. The study also showed that the rapidly changing magnetic field of a close lightning flash is strong enough to excite the neurons in the brain. Scientists at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, recorded ball lightning during a thunderstorm in Qinghai when they were mapping radiation. This ball rolled across without doing any harm to two women and a young man who were here; but on getting into an adjoining stable it exploded and killed a pig which happened to be shut up there, and which, knowing nothing about the wonders of thunder and lightning, dared to smell it in the most rude and unbecoming manner. In 2017, Researchers from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, have proposed that the bright glow of lightning balls is created when microwaves become trapped inside a plasma bubble. One early account reports the Great Thunderstorm at a church in Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, in England, on 21 October 1638. Large stones from the church walls were hurled onto the ground and through large wooden beams. Powell measured their spectra, and found that the after-glow comes mostly from metastable NO ions, which are long-lived at low temperatures. An experimental investigation of this effect, published in 2007, reported producing "luminous balls with lifetime in the order of seconds" by evaporating pure silicon with an electric arc. The visual effect can be described as small glowing, sparkling orbs that roll around a surface. The ball lightning appears as a plasma caviton at the antinodal plane of the microwave radiation from the maser.[73]. The burnt portion of the object flares up into a large ball of fire, while "plasma balls" float near the oven chamber ceiling. A video recorded by accident of ball lightning in China is now shedding light on the phenomenon's mysterious origins, researchers say. Some accounts describe it as moving through solid masses of wood or metal without effect, while others describe it as destructive and melting or burning those substances. [2], A 1753 report recounts lethal ball lightning when professor Georg Richmann of Saint Petersburg, Russia, constructed a kite-flying apparatus similar to Benjamin Franklin's proposal a year earlier. Because of the fire and sulphur smell, contemporaries explained the ball of fire as "the devil" or as the "flames of hell". Ball lightning occurs as glowing spheres ranging in size from a golf ball to a very large beach ball (1 to 100 centimeters, or 0.4 inches to 39 inches, in diameter). On 6 August 1944 a ball of lightning went through a closed window in, In 1954 Domokos Tar, a physicist, observed a lightning strike during a heavy thunderstorm in. This strengthens the possibility of lightning-induced seizure in the occipital lobe of a person close to a lightning strike, establishing the connection between epileptic hallucination mimicking ball lightning and thunderstorms. A ball of lightning which entered the church of Stralsund, on exploding, projected a number of balls which exploded in their turn like shells.[19]. "Ball Lightning Explanation Leading to Clean Energy." [26], Descriptions of ball lightning vary widely. Although lightning balls are… thunderstorm. A related group uses the generic name "Unconventional Plasmas". Cooray and Cooray (2008)[90] stated that the features of hallucinations experienced by patients having epileptic seizures in the occipital lobe are similar to the observed features of ball lightning. Lightning striking Earth's soil could vaporize the silica contained within it, and somehow separate the oxygen from the silicon dioxide, turning it into pure silicon vapor. From the spectrum, the temperature of the ball lightning was assessed as being lower than the temperature of the parent lightning (<15,000 to 30,000 K). By this explosion the main top-mast was shattered into pieces and the main mast went down to the keel. Just a few years ago, an alleged event of ball lightning in China was by chance captured on a spectrograph following a lightning bolt striking the ground, providing researchers with a breakdown of its electromagnetic spectrum. [94], Chen was able to derive the physics and found that there is a class of plasma toroids that remain stable with or without an external magnetic containment, a new plasma configuration unlike anything reported elsewhere. Experiments by Eli Jerby and Vladimir Dikhtyar in Israel revealed that microwave plasma balls are made up of nanoparticles with an average radius of 25 nm (9.8×10−7 inches). https://www.nationalgeographic.com/.../weather/reference/ball-lightning In some observations, the ball lightning appeared to have an extremely high energy concentration[85] but this phenomenon hasn't been adequately verified. Still invisible, and due to the central and surface tension-forces, it shrinks to an intermediate state of a cylinder, and finally into a ball. New York, A crewman went out to retrieve the fallen body and was struck by a second ball, which knocked him back and left him with mild burns. When this maintains the ionization, the ball is then a soliton in the flow of atmospheric electricity. Ball lightning has been described as transparent, translucent, multicolored, evenly lit, radiating flames, filaments or sparks, with shapes that vary between spheres, ovals, tear-drops, rods, or disks. Powell's kinetic theory calculation found that the ball size is set by the second Townsend coefficient (the mean free path of conduction electrons) near breakdown. While the experiment was under way, ball lightning appeared, travelled down the string, struck Richmann's forehead and killed him. )[citation needed], Theoretical calculations from University of Innsbruck researchers suggest that the magnetic fields involved in certain types of lightning strikes could potentially induce visual hallucinations resembling ball lightning. The resulting transformation subsequently becomes visible once the energy is concentrated into the final spherical stage. Thunderstorm, a violent short-lived weather disturbance that is almost … He built a lab that produces lightning level arcs, and by modifying the conditions he produced bright, small balls that mimic ball lightning and persist in atmosphere after the arc ends. [54][55], Many modern experiments involve using a microwave oven to produce small rising glowing balls, often referred to as plasma balls. The Chinese scientists detected traces of soil elements such as silicon, iron and calcium from the ball lightning. [14], An English journal reported that during an 1809 storm, three "balls of fire" appeared and "attacked" the British ship HMS Warren Hastings. For a globe the amplification factor is 3. This page was last edited on 28 November 2020, at 10:15. On contact with an object, these balls release large amounts of energy. 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