The birth of lightning was recorded on video

    Everyone has seen lightning many times, but no one has yet seen in detail how lightning originates in a thundercloud.

    Three years ago, Spanish physicists Joan Montanyà and Oscar van der Velde of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain) installed a high-speed camera in the Ebro River Valley in northeastern Spain in the hope of capturing this physical phenomenon. September 9, 2012 they were lucky: they managed to make high-quality video of lightning at a speed of 11019 frames / s.

    For three years, scientists analyzed the video, and now finally published it in the public domain as an accompanying material for scientific work.in the journal Scientific Reports. In the article, they describe in detail the mechanism of bidirectional initiation of lightning. The video lasts 32 seconds, but this is a slow-motion video sequence of events that actually lasted about 25 milliseconds.



    The Lightning Research team at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia has been studying lightning for more than a decade . Colleagues call them "lightning hunters": with the onset of a thunderstorm, Professor Montagna and his colleagues leave in his van, which is equipped with a high-speed camera, a detector of high-energy particles, an antenna, and other equipment. Lightning is an unpredictable natural phenomenon. A discharge can be formed at any time in an arbitrary place, therefore, high-quality shooting, which scientists succeeded in 2012, is of such value.





    The published video shows the formation of electric discharges in an electric field under a thundercloud. In the first second of the video, a leader is formed - a bright thermo-ionized channel with high conductivity. At about the seventh second, a negatively charged leader makes contact with a positively charged filament of electrical discharge on the left side of the frame. At this moment, the electrical resistance of the air does not withstand the intensity of the electric field - and a bright flash of lightning occurs. Here, electrical energy is converted into heat, light and sound.





    The authors of the scientific work analyze in detail the process of bi-directional growth of lightning leaders. It corresponds to the theoretical model that Heinz-Wolfram Kasemir first introduced in 1960 and which was used for 3D modeling of lightning in 2002-2010.

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