You thought you were SO smart!
You thought you KNEW where lightning came from, but you don't.
Because it comes from the SUN.
Howdy light bulbs, Trace here comin' atcha from DNews with your weekly space update!
Lightning is a fairly common way for nature to showcase its raw power.
Molecules in the clouds bump and grind on each other, creating a buildup of static electricity.
As the cloud becomes positively charged, electrons snake up from the negatively charged ground
called step leaders.
When the electrons meet SHHHHKKKKK!!
Lightning!
Science is awesome.
Anyway, that's what we USED to think, turns out there's a bigger, badder baller on the
block.
The friggin' SUN.
A new study in Environmental Research Letters found the solar wind may be affecting the
amount of lightning we're seeing on the ground.
The sun is constantly producing a stream of electrons and protons travelling a million
miles an hour flowing in all directions away from it.
This is commonly called the solar wind -- because Earth is bathed in the high-speed little buggers
constantly, and during periods of high solar activity, like now, the solar wind "blows"
even stronger.
Though we think of the sun as a solid ball, it's a giant nuclear furnace made of gas that
takes 27 days to fully rotate.
The particles it emits are therefore fluctuating in a predictable pattern as well.
The scientists describe the solar wind as waves, because it can vary in density, temperature
and charge, based on where the sun is in its cycle.
When these high-energy particles hit Earth's magnetic field, we get aurora, and they usually
just bounce off and keep going.
However, when a relatively slow wave is overtaken by a relatively fast wave it overwhelms Earth's
magnetic shield and some of the particles break into the upper atmosphere, charging
up the clouds and causing an increase in either frequency or intensity of lightning.
They weren't exactly clear on which of those it was...
It's not just our sun causing this static buildup, when OTHER stars explode millions
of light-years away, they ALSO send out these high-energy particles and some of them do
eventually hit us too.
Mathematically, this is mind boggling, right?
What are the chances of a star exploding millions of years ago at JUST the right time to shoot
out a particle which after millions of years will hit US and cause a lightning strike that
will FINALLY give me super powers?
WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?!
Knowing this, the scientists say, might help improve long-term weather forecasting.
Somehow.
Are you blown away by this solar wind thing?
Tell us in the comments below and get funky with it.
Make sure you subscribe and also, space friends, NEXT Wednesday we doing a Google Hangout with
NASA/JPL and it's going to rock.
Literally.
Because we're talking about Meteors.
Check the description for the link to RSVP and get your questions ready!
I'm super excited about this, it's going to be every month!
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or me at-TraceDominguez, and thanks for watching, y'all are the bestest.