Using specialized equipment installed on the International Space Station (ISS), a group of scientists have achieved a rare record of a “blue jet”, a specific type of lightning storm originating in clouds and going into space is. The overview was described in the published article Nature, Last Wednesday (20).
As the study’s authors explain, blue jets “resemble lightning several hundred milliseconds over a period of lightning, which propagate in cones as they propagate from the tops of storm clouds to the stratosphere.”
According to the scientists, they saw at least five blue rays above the clouds, each of between 10 and 20 milliseconds and could reach an altitude of 50 km in the stratosphere. The animation below, created by the European Space Agency (ESA), shows how the event occurs. Look:
These blue jets were spotted in February 2019, during a storm on the island of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean. They arise from an “electrical breakdown”, which occurs by the encounter between different charges between two clouds, while the bliss tint is the effect of stimulating stratospheric nitrogen.
Impossible to see from the surface of the earth
Due to the distance and also due to the storm clouds that hide them, the blue jet cannot be seen from the surface of the Earth. In this specific case, the record was made with the instruments of the European Space Atmospheric Interaction Monitor (ASIM) present at the space station.
According to astronomers, the study of such phenomena, also known as light emission and very low frequency disturbances, due to the sources of electromagnetic pulse (elves), helps to understand how it propagates Can affect. radio waves, Interfering with communication, in addition to indicating what concentration affects electricity Green House Effect On the environment.
