Image via Xenophilia
No, that’s not a UFO you just saw travel across the horizon. That bizarre orb of glowing light is called ‘ball lightning’, and despite many reports of sightings over hundreds of years, scientists still know very little about this strange and unusual natural phenomenon.
They can’t tell us what causes it, or even exactly what it is. They can’t explain why people report being able to get startlingly close to these orbs, which reportedly range in size from tennis balls to beach balls, and seeing them roll on the ground.
Image via Xenophilia
National Geographic has a first-hand account from Graham K. Hubler, a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC:
“It drifted along a few feet above the ground,” Hubler recalled, “but when it came inside [the pavilion] it dropped down to the ground and skittered along the floor.”
“It made lots of gyrations or oscillations and a hissing sound like boiling water. When it went out the other side [of the pavilion], it climbed back up [several feet off the ground].”
Hubler says the ball behaved as if it had a charge and was following electric field lines along the Earth.
“I remember telling people what I had seen, and they thought I was crazy, so I stopped talking about it,” he said.
There are around 10,000 written accounts spanning many countries, all with similar observations. The sightings generally accompany thunderstorms, but scientists aren’t sure whether ball lightning is related to conventional lightning. Ball lightning floats near the ground, sometimes bouncing off the ground or other surfaces, doesn’t react to wind and defies the laws of gravity. An average ball lightning glows with the brightness of a 100-watt bulb, and some people have even reported seeing it melt glass windows.
Images via Ern Mainka Photography
We’ve included some photos here that purport to be of ball lightning, but it’s difficult to say whether that is really what has been captured. The one below shows what researchers believe might be ball lightning created in a laboratory.
Image via Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik
These videos may have captured ball lightning in action:
From National Geographic:
The record suggests that ball lightning is not inherently deadly, but there are reports of people being killed by contact—most notably the pioneering electricity researcher Georg Richmann, who died in 1753.
Richmann is believed to have been electrocuted by ball lightning as he conducted a lightning-rod experiment in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The phenomenon lasts only a short time, perhaps ten seconds, before either fading away or violently dissipating with a small explosion.
Theories include plasma clouds composed of charged particles that recombine into atoms and glow with light, as well as small particles holding together in a ball by electrical charges emitting chemical energy through oxidation. Researchers are trying to reproduce the conditions that seem to cause ball lightning in a laboratory setting to research the phenomenon further.
Bizarre, shocking and strange – it just goes to show that there is still so much mystery in this world, so many things we can’t explain or understand.
Link [National Geographic]
