For the first Time, scientists looked down at the formation of lightning from inside the International Space Station and saw a blue light emerge upward from within a thick cloud layer.
Most people have seen the spectacular sight of a bolt of lightning streaking across the sky from above. Recently, for the first time, scientists looked down at the formation of lightning from inside the International Space Station (ISS) and saw the strange sight of a blue light emerging upward from within a thick cloud layer and passing away in a flash.
The European Space Agency (ESA) uses the Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM), located inside the ISS, to observe the formation of lightning.
The ISS is located about four hundred kilometers from the ground. The observations were made using optical cameras, photometers, X-rays, and gamma-ray detectors that were just installed in 2018, with the goal of understanding exactly how the electrical charges formed by stormy weather propagate from the center of the storm to the upper atmosphere.
The study described seeing five intense blue flashes from different directions at the top of the clouds. One of them ejected a blue light upward.
Jet blue lightning is a type of lightning that shoots upward and lasts less than one second, yet can reach the stratosphere up to 50 kilometers above the ground. This observation saw such a blue lightning bolt, lasting about 10 microseconds, near the island nation of Nauru, located in the South Pacific.
The flash was also at the base of the ionosphere, forming a giant circle of visible and ultraviolet light that spreads out rapidly as a result of the interaction of electrons, radio waves and components within the atmosphere.
This observation was recently published as a cover study in the journal Nature.
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