Have you ever seen a red lightning? It’s a real phenomenon.
Recently, National Geographic’s official Instagram has just published photos of this phenomenon. And honestly, they’re gorgeous.
Red lightning.
The photo above was taken by photographer Babak Tafreshi, taking a close-up of a natural phenomenon called ” Red Sprite”. Essentially, s prite is a large-scale electrical discharge directly above thunderstorm clouds – also known as cumulus clouds , at an altitude of 50 – 90km.
However, calling it an upper-atmospheric lightning is not entirely accurate. The essence of the sprite is to release cold plasma jets , more like the discharge process in fluorescent tubes than ordinary lightning.
The sprite rays are usually orange-red in color. However, they are almost colorless when viewed with the naked eye, only showing true colors under the lenses of sufficiently sensitive cameras. On the other hand, sprites are also extremely fast, making it extremely difficult to take pictures of them.
Therefore, Tafreshi’s photo is considered to be super rare , because in history there are not many cases where it can be taken. The name “sprite” itself is also given based on their characteristics,
Red lightning sprite at a wider angle.
The existence of sprites was first identified by Johann Georg Estor in 1730, when he noticed something optically common above thunderstorm clouds. By 1925, CTR Wilson – a Nobel laureate – hypothesized that there was a discharge of electrical charge above thunderstorm clouds, and in 1956 he confidently confirmed that he had observed sprites. .
But it wasn’t until 1989 that visual evidence of the sprite was captured with a light-sensitive camera by a team of experts from the University of Minnesota. And ever since it was precisely determined that the sprite existed, reports of it have also continuously appeared and become the subject of intense scientific research.
Sprite lightning has been recorded in the Americas, Europe, Central Africa, Australia, Japan and some countries in Asia. Matthew Geoff McHarg from the US Air Force Institute has classified sprites into 3 types based on their shape, including:
Jellyfish SpriteSpSp.
Carrot Sprite.
Historically, sprites have been blamed for several crashes in the aerospace industry, when instruments flew higher than thunderstorm clouds. For example, NASA’s stratospheric hot air balloon was launched on June 6, 1989. When reaching an altitude of 37km, passing a storm in Texas, the device was severely out of control.
Several months after the crash, experts concluded that the balloon had been “hit by lightning” as it passed through a thunderstorm cloud. In 1993, the cause was changed back to sprite, because at this time the term was born.