Overview
Earth is our home to survive, in this blue planet, we humans are still quite small, although we say that we have 7 billion people, but we still do not have a glimpse of the true appearance of the Earth.
In nature there are still many strange and unheard of phenomena that occur every day, refreshing our human perception of the planet one at a time, even if many of our daily lives are very common in our very familiar natural phenomena, tracing the roots up is not something we can really understand, such as lightning.
Although we can see it whenever it rains and thunders, but in fact there is such a kind of lightning, with a special composition of physical phenomena, until today we have not uncovered its true mystery, which in the end is what lightning?
What is lightning?
To unravel the special physical phenomenon we described in the previous article, we have to understand what lightning actually is and how it is formed.
We all know that lightning usually occurs in cloudy and rainy skies, because lightning cannot be formed without clouds.
Everything in the world has an electric charge, from our bodies to tall buildings, mountains have an electric charge, when humans use electricity, if the two electrodes to voltage and make them collide, it will produce sparks and hissing sound. Lightning in nature can also be understood as the formation of such.
After the electric charges in the sky meet, they will immediately produce the electrode phenomenon we mentioned in the previous article, thus exploding into a blinding flash of light and a booming sound. Although we can observe lightning with the naked eye, but we have absolutely no way to really understand it.
First of all, the shortest lightning must have dozens of hundreds of meters so long, and the longest lightning can even reach several thousand meters, such a length is really very appalling, except that lightning is generally far away from us, so we have no way to intuitively experience the size of lightning with the naked eye.
In our eyes, it is just a "gap" in the sky, but its actual length is much larger than we can imagine.
Not only that, the lightning is hot enough to be frightening. The temperature of lightning is commonly above 17,000 degrees Celsius, a temperature sufficient to melt almost any material we perceive.
The good thing is that this lightning is occurring in a few thousand meters above the altitude, otherwise it will have a significant impact on humans, after all, we are familiar with the sun is only 5000 ℃ surface temperature, a lightning bolt can actually release such a strong high temperature, it is also really surprising.
To sum up, lightning for our small human speaking, is a very dangerous natural phenomenon, but it generally occurs at high altitude on our lives is not much, in the current society basically all buildings have lightning rod, so we do not care too much about the sky in the explosion of lightning.
But there is such a kind of lightning, but can produce close contact with humans, the physical phenomenon behind it is also baffling, this is what we will say next - spherical lightning.
Ball Lightning
Ball lightning in fact, in ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literature can be found in many works, but the people at that time, the low level of technology, and feudal thinking is more serious, have thought that this ball lightning is a divine punishment sent down from heaven, not in the least to this spherical things and the sky in the lightning link.
But with the rapid development of science and technology, more and more scientists found that although this spherical lightning is rare, but it has many similarities with the lightning in the sky, so scientists believe that this phenomenon can also be called lightning, but its shape is closer to a circle, so it will be called spherical lightning.
Many people believe that this spherical lightning is actually inseparable from the magnetic field, because the formation of lightning is the interaction between the electrodes, and the interaction between the electrodes is very short, so the lightning is a flash.
But this spherical lightning can be maintained for a long time and then produce an explosion, so the formation of ball lightning in addition to the interaction between the electrodes, but also will inevitably have the influence of magnetic fields, scientists this is the ball lightning and electromagnetic interference combined.
But the community still has a different view, because the ball lightning is too bizarre, no matter how to explain there is no way to completely interpret it, so a considerable part of the scientific workers believe that the formation of ball lightning may be more esoteric, it is likely to have some relationship with the cosmic string theory.
Because the shape of this lightning is spherical and all the celestial bodies in the universe are quite similar, so the so-called ball lightning may be a cosmic phenomenon rather than the Earth phenomenon, the formation of ball lightning has not been understood, but the release of its energy is very similar to many celestial bodies in the universe, it is really puzzling, can not help but think more than.
Study of ball lightning
As mentioned earlier, ball lightning is a very rare physical phenomenon, although there are witnesses around the world, confirming the existence of this phenomenon, but the scientists who have the ability to analyze ball lightning, have never seen it with their own eyes, let alone carry out research on it.
Therefore, most of the research on ball lightning is based on hypothesis and conjecture or frame-by-frame analysis of videos taken by eyewitnesses, and to a large extent, the research on ball lightning can be considered a blank sheet of paper.
Concluding remarks
In any case, ball lightning does exist, and we humans are still too small in front of it, after all, this is a physical phenomenon that we can not really explain yet. But we should not feel discouraged, because scientists will certainly work harder on the Earth's natural phenomena to carry out research, but also believe that in the near future, we humans will be able to understand this amazing phenomenon.
