Ball lightning may be more exotic than microwave oven sparks, but most scientists are convinced that it is no less real. Martin A. Uman, chair of the department of electrical computer engineering at the University of Florida at Gainesville explains:
"Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. There is no accepted theory for what causes it. It does not necessarily consist of plasma; for example, ball lightning could be the result of a chemiluminescent process. The literature abounds with speculations on the physics of the ball lightning."
Peter H. Handel in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri at St. Louis provided a detailed overview and advances his favored model of ball lightning:
"According to statistical investigations carried out by J. R. McNally in 1960 (J. R. McNally, "Preliminary Report on Ball Lightning" in Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society, Gatlinburg, No. 2AD5 [1960], Paper J-15, pp. 1AD25), ball lightning has been seen by 5 percent of the population of the earth. This percentage is about the same as the fraction of the population that has seen an ordinary lightning strike at close range--that is, close enough to see the direct point of the lightning impact.
"Ball lightning was seen and described since antiquity, often by groups of people, and recorded in many places. It is in general described as a luminous sphere, most often the size of a small child's head. It appears usually during thunderstorms, sometimes within a few seconds of lightning but sometimes without apparent connection to a lightning bolt. In some cases, ball lightning appears after a thunderstorm--or even before it. Its lifetime varies widely, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes; the average duration is about 25 seconds. The lifetime of ball lightning tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness. Balls that appear distinctly orange and blue seem to last longer than average. Many of these general characteristics are based on the work of A. I. Grigoriev, who analyzed more than 10,000 cases of ball lightning (A.I. Grigoriev, " Statistical Analysis of the Ball Lightning Properties," in Science of Ball Lightning, edited by Y. H. Ohtsuki, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1988, pp. 88AD134).
"Ball lightning usually moves parallel to the earth, but it takes vertical jumps. Sometimes it descends from the clouds, other times it suddenly materializes either indoors or outdoors or enters a room through a closed or open window, through thin nonmetallic walls or through the chimney. When it passes through closed windows, the lightning ball damages them with small holes about one third of the time. The balls have no observable buoyancy effect. All these attributes led the great Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa in 1955 to interpret ball lightning as an electrodeless discharge caused by a standing UHF waves of unknown origin present between the earth and the cloud; earlier versions of this idea date back to the 1930s.
"Scientists have since refined Kapitsa's speculation. The Maser-Soliton Theory, which I first described in 1975 (P.H. Handel, "Maser Theory of Ball Lightning" in Bulletin of the American Physical Society Series II, Vol. 20 [1975], No. 26), is the present-day version of the UHF discharge approach. I have been directing research on the Maser-Soliton Theory at the Kurchatov Scientific Center in Moscow since 1992. According to this theory, outdoor ball lightning is caused by an atmospheric maser-- analogous to a laser, but operating at a much lower energy--having a volume of the order of many cubic kilometers.
"In technical terms, the maser is generated by a population inversion induced in the rotational energy levels of the water molecules by the short field pulse associated with streak lightning. The large volume of air that is affected by the strike makes it difficult for photons to escape before they cause 'microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation' (the maser effect). Unless the volume of air is very large or else is enclosed in a conducting cavity (as is the case of ball lightning in airplanes or submarines and to a certain degree also indoors), collisions between the molecules will consume all the energy of the population inversion. If the volume is large, the maser can generate a localized electrical field or soliton that gives rise to the observed ball lightning. Such a discharge has not yet been created in the laboratory, however.
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6 Comments
Add CommentIt is an interesting topic. i want to know that is it usefull in any technical field.Can u send me detailed information n also
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishazards if any
When I was about 4 years old there was a thunderstorm one afternoon and myself and my younger brother huddled with our mother on the bed - I remember a terrible roaring noise outside, my mother screaming in fear and a lightbulb which crashed to the floor from the ceiling. Most of all though, I remember an orange fireball bouncing along outside the (ground floor) bedroom window. I've always wondered whether I imagined the orange ball, even though afterwards there was a small crack across the width of the road outside and a huge strip taken off a tree trunk (we lived in the countryside) so clearly there'd been major lightning. Afterwards my Dad said the lightning had touched the tree and the road but he couldn't explain the orange ball my mother and I insisted we'd seen. I now realise it must have been ball lightning and we were probably 'privileged' to witness it. This happened in rural South Kilkenny, Ireland sometime around 1970/71 - I just wanted it on record, as, being in an isolated area, we were probably the only witnesses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was taking a walk during a lull between thunder storms on 11/7/09 and saw a brilliant silvery ball about three feet off the ground. It was about the size of a baseball and shot up into the clouds, there was a huge clap of thunder that almost knocked me down. Was this ball lightning?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn 4/20/09 near Mount Holly, NJ I heard something I had not heard before. I was on a 2 meter net at about 8:30 PM. A fast moving thunderstorm was passing through and I could hear frequent lightning crashes. I noticed that the lightning crashes had long, decaying white noise tails lasting 15-20 seconds. This happened 5 or 10 times. I asked if other radio amateurs heard this. One several miles away said he heard it too. I do not know if we were hearing the same crashes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe were operating on 145.290 mHz using NBFM via the K2AA repeater. I don't know whether the noise I heard came through the repeater or directly. I was using a Kenwood handi-talkie and an indoor antenna. I wondered if the long noise tails were due to ball lightning.
When I was 7 years old, we rented a weekend house in the plains, close to Buenos Aires. My parents and sisters can't believe I can't rememberthe night that an orange ball liminous the size of a tennis ball entered through a (closed) window, moving about half a meter a second (a guess, as they told me it moved really slow). Everyone (mother, father, and two sisters) saw it a meter away from them and stood still speechless. It went out through a window on the opposite side of the house.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout 10 years later I was in the funeral of person very close to our family. This was near Pilar, and the area was mostly rural with lots of green. It was about to rain and there where some hints of a thunderstorm. Just when they finished lowering the cage below ground, and we where about to go (of course there was a lot of people around when this happened), a lightning ball materialized from below the grown, moving very slowly (from the descriptions), and then suddenly accelerated into the clouds. 5 seconds later it started raining. The ball had passed at about 30cm to my right, where there was some space between the next person. Should it have taken any other direction, it would have probably been a tragedy. I coudn't see this ball either (maybe it was too close and I was looking somewhere else?), though there are more than 10 eye witness that did see it. They won't forget, as they were relatives and might thought that there was some meaning to the ball going into the clouds just as the man was buried.
5% have seen them, so it's no wonder that I believe this phenomena. There's no reason for collectively inventing this stories.
Wish I had been looking more careful though. With all the cellphones with cameras out there that can record movies, I think that we should have several filmed in the next couple of years. Unless something prevents that happening, which would be too strange.
Hi
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy late grandmother also told a story of walking back from school when she was maybe 12 years old - during a rare thunderstorm in England during the summertime - she said she was frightened but fascinated by a ball about the size of a football which glowed and radiated light which floated a few feet away from her at about shoulder height for a period of maybe 30 seconds or so - it was accompanied by a crackling sound and continued along it same direction before it disappeared. She was also walking back home in a park where there were a number of trees etc - I'll get the full story from my mum and report back - but this story has been in the family for years - and my grandmother was not one to hallucinate or invent tall stories - much to the contrary - so I believe this phenomenon - and would welcome any responses!!! - Glad I could add one of my own (although I haven't experienced it person, I think I'm glad I never have!!!!) - Although there was also something I recall about leaving a door or window open during a thunderstorm incase a firebolt came in ? maybe the same thing - I love thunderstorms anyway - but I do make a point of running off the golf course when the horns blow these days LOL (p.s. Living in South Africa now - so they're a bit more frequent - especially in the summer in the Highveld!)... Matt Wilkes