Posted on 04/08/2018 6:27:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), these unusual features were first spotted by accident in 1989.
Minnesota professor John R Winckler was testing a television camera in advance of an upcoming rocket launch, when he realised that two frames showed bright columns of light above a distant storm cloud.
The discovery came as a shock to scientists at the time, according to Dr Torsten Neubert, ASIM's lead scientist. "That really surprised all of us. How come this exists and we didn't know it? Airline pilots must have known about it - there are some anecdotal descriptions," the Technical University of Denmark physicist said.
For the better part of a century before TLEs were caught on camera, people who spotted them had been reporting "rocket lightning" or "upward lightning". Now in need of names, the phenomena were christened sprites and elves because of their fleeting, mysterious nature.
Yet despite their diminutive monikers, these features are anything but small, and extend tens of kilometres into the atmosphere.
"They are slightly different to lightning," Dr Neubert told BBC News. "It's a pulse of the electric field that travels up. For the sprite - when the atmosphere gets thin, the field can get a discharge."
Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike.
Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.
Although they are more elusive, "elves are incredibly well understood," says Dr Martin Fullekrug from the University of Bath.
They are the most common TLE, thought to occur twice as often as sprites.
Blue jets - upward electrical discharges from cloud tops - are the least well known
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Here we go again!
The evidence from analyzing the face of Mars is that these may begin as “lightning precursor discharges”, but that they actually in fruition are plasma discharges. These cause HUGE
geological plowing on some planets. Mars has these features.
40 years of professional flying, world wide, never saw the phenomenon.
DC
“Would you like a sprite with your lightning?”
Didn’t we switch from incondescent bulbs to those?
Golly, Torsten, I don't know but I sure hope thrown tens of billions of tax dollars at it so you never have to actually do anything for a living.
Hmm. The article calls this “mystery giant lightning” in the title, but then goes on to explain exactly what is happening. I think there is not a mystery here.
No, there are still mysterys here.
Did you know that these are so energetic that anti-matter is produced and annihilated in the sprites?
Lots of other weird stuff that we don't yet understand going on in there.
I once saw blue-green “glows” after lightning strikes. I was at ground-level.
They described the overall phenomena—they know what it is. The rest is just details. No mystery.
Yeah...we need to stop calling it space.Too many things out there..it should be LUZ instead...Large Uninhabitable Zones...just sayin...
Sprites and elves are aptly named for their fantasmical appearance unlike the geological Kames and Eskers portion of a glacial deposit which sound like a brand of ice cream bars.
the Grand Canyon
Maybe they should listen and take seriously what the pilots tell them?
Nah!
Looks like a plasma strike!
That’s plasma.
Visit here. You’ll be glad you did !
The Thunderbolts Project
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/ ( Thanks Fred)
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