Ball lightning is weird: a spherical glowing object that zooms horizontally at a fast rate before vanishing. (I wonder how many UFO sightings are ball lightning.) It’s a rare phenomenon — far more so than ordinary lightning — so nobody had been able to measure its properties with scientific equipment until now. As it happened, a group of scientists in China who were studying regular lightning serendipitously spotted a ball lightning event, and measured its chemical signature. The verdict?

Now, a team of researchers serendipitously observed ball lightning at a time when they had the right equipment to study it. Jianyong Cen, Ping Yuan, and Simin Xue were in the field measuring the properties of ordinary lightning when they happened to catch ball lightning with both their high-speed cameras and their spectrographs. They found the chemical composition of the event matched that of soil. That strongly supports the hypothesis (proposed nearly fifteen years ago) that ball lightning is basically a dirt clod dislodged and heated to incandescence by a cloud-to-ground lightning strike. [Read more…]

Ball lightning and spectrum