A photographer recorded one of the rarest rays from planet Earth in the skies of Puerto Rico while capturing images of a lightning storm offshore in an unincorporated area of the United States.
A giant jet-shaped lightning, accompanied by a ball of fire, was even admired by NASA scientists studying the phenomenon. Clique’s author, Frankie Lucena, says she couldn’t believe the result when she watched the show on Monday (20).
“This giant jet plasma event occurred during a very powerful storm near the Virgin Islands just before Tropical Storm Peter,” the photographer explained on his social network. “I can’t believe I was able to capture such incredible detail.”
According to meteorology company Metsul, the lightning pulled by Lucena is considered “the highest on Earth” because it collides with the ionosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that extends from 60 to 1000 km at altitudes, over 80 km. situated at.
The first records of this type of light jet were held only in 2001 and 2002 by Taiwan and Puerto Rico. But since then there have been dozens of “phantoms” who have researched its origins, which have not been fully proven to date.
“They like to storm over water and are famous for surprising passengers on commercial aircraft,” said Tony Phillips, a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) scientist who studied the phenomenon, in an article on the Spaceweather website.
Ray scientist Oscar van der Velde of the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya also praised Lucena’s achievement, recalling his experience with the event. In 2017 and 2018, they mounted high-speed cameras on Colombia’s north coast in a survey dedicated to capturing the giant jet. But in three months of observation, he only managed to capture twelve,
“Frankie photographed a rare giant jet with a ‘carrot’ morphology, which was first reported in a study published in Nature by Su et al (2003),” detailed the researcher in the same article, noting that That event may also have the shape of a tree.
“It’s the brightest giant jet I’ve ever seen. It was really remarkable,” he admires, also mentioning a possible origin of the event. “They could be jet crossings or plasma flows inside areas of overheating”, theorizes the researcher from Catalan University.
