Slashdot Mirror
Ball Lightning Created In the Lab
EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples. From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a movie of the phenomenon.
Looks like the video link is already Slashdotted. But the video also seems to be all over YouTube (particularly since the story is a few days old). Here's a link to it at YouTube.
Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
that no scientist has ever proposed singularities as the source of ball lightning.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That sounds like this New Scientist article:
m g19225831.700
a 1k
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/
The same guy also talks about ball lightning due to neutrinos here:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=88edu
Cthulhu loves you.
Check it out at here .