Every year people die trying to make a spectacular video of ball lightning.
Rains, thunderstorms and lightning will not surprise anyone, this year for sure. Unless it's fireball! An amazing mystery of nature, beautiful and terrible at the same time. Where they come from, what are dangerous for humans, we learned from the doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, leading researcher of the Department of Physical Electronics of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University. Lomonosov Vladimir Lvovich Bychkov.
Freeze and she will not notice …
- Ball lightning is a phenomenon as rare as it is unexplored. Because it is unexplored because it is rare. Scientists in different parts of the world are chasing this fireball, trying to predict where ball lightning may appear next, but so far not very effectively. How can they be studied at all?
- People tend to see fireballs during a thunderstorm. Therefore, during a thunderstorm, scientists expose special cameras that operate in a constant mode, with an open lens. And they fix, if a ball lightning appears, in the form of some kind of wavy line. But now people have begun to walk with mobile phones. And during a thunderstorm, they began to shoot everything that was luminous. And this is an extremely dangerous occupation. The other day I was doing an analysis of fireball deaths that have occurred over the past few years. Ball lightning strikes a mobile phone once a year. And the owner dies when interacting with the discharge. When a person holds a mobile phone in his hands, he is holding a small antenna. The electric field increases around it. And then the charged object begins to be attracted to it.
- Since this phenomenon has electromagnetic properties, it turns out that the best recommendation when meeting with ball lightning is just not to move? So that it does not react to our electrical charge?
- Man is a fairly average conductor of electricity: we are filled with liquid. Therefore, we attract lightning to a much lesser extent than a mobile phone. But we still attract.
Promotional video:
If you are standing still, then your own charge attracts ball lightning, and on the other hand, you are radiating, you are breathing. And from you there is a thermal and hydrodynamic flow towards ball lightning. Therefore, this flow can slow down ball lightning, and it will be picked up by the wind, by the flow of air and move, it will not touch you. You are right to stand still, not move if you are in an open area, or if fireball has entered your apartment. But it is better to always close windows and vents during a thunderstorm. In the villages, they know this and even close the plugs in the stoves so that the lightning does not pass through the chimney.
- That is, if you blow on it energetically, it can fly off?
- Do not. When you blow vigorously, you create a somewhat complex flow. And it can slow down anywhere, and there will be a reverse flow, which will attract it to you.
- There are stories of how lightning passed through glass, objects, flew out of the socket. That is, it can appear anywhere and from anywhere?
- Ball lightning often appears during thunderstorm activity. Curious how it interacts with glass. It can knock out a large hole, almost as large as its diameter. Can penetrate a chip or small window. And she can enter the room without leaving a trace, as if glass is not an obstacle for her. Sometimes it is possible to look at these glasses, and it turns out that in some cases it leaves a microscopic hole through which, most likely, it passed.
And with an outlet - this is the most interesting case. You can imagine that there is an increase in voltage, a breakdown in your outlet. During breakdown, this body appears. And under the influence of pressure, ball lightning begins to creep out through the hole in the outlet.
- And what size is it most often?
- When out of the socket, it is of very different sizes. In one observation, she was ten centimeters. And another time, I talked with an observer, he had a working receiver on his table, and suddenly a ball lightning 19 centimeters in size, crimson in color, crawled out of the contacts where the connector was. He was shocked, didn't know what to do. Moved, accidentally touched the receiver with his hand. I felt a piercing heatstroke. Then the ball recoiled back, and the man recoiled from the ball by three meters. And the ball went back into the socket and disappeared.
- In the mountains and over the oceans, ball lightning reaches enormous sizes - up to several meters in diameter. It's true?
- An Australian colleague and I published an article where he cites observations in Australia. A man was driving a car, a thunderstorm broke out. And suddenly a luminous area appeared - one hundred meters in diameter. Ball lightning! If we talk about observations at sea, there are luminous formations and more, as they say - up to 400 meters.
- And at what speed does the ball lightning move?
- Statistics show that indoors it moves at a speed of 1-5 m / s. Outside the room, it can be up to tens of meters per second. She often moves at hurricane speed. And for some reason, hurricanes are often carried out. And this is an extremely dangerous phenomenon when a ball lightning caught by a hurricane flow flies.
This would be energy, but in a peaceful direction…
- It was in Transcarpathia in 1962. A fireball the size of a tennis ball hit the cattle water trough. Within ten seconds, 110 liters of water completely boiled away, and boiled frogs remained at the bottom. The calculation shows that it takes about 80 kilowatt-hours of energy to heat and evaporate such an amount of water. That is, on the order of the monthly energy consumption of a small apartment. At the same time, ball lightning developed at that time a power of about 27 million watts, which is tens of thousands of times higher than the power of a household microwave. Is this not a reason to try to study and reproduce ball lightning?
- I must say that for a long time it was believed that ball lightning is a low-energy object. However, this case that you are describing is quite indicative. There is also another - when in England ball lightning fell into a small barrel of water and also evaporated it. The energy that is released and goes to the evaporation of water is a hundred times greater than the energy of explosives. This is such an energy-intensive system.
Naturally, if you learn to create such an object, then the question arises of how to get energy from it. If it is chemical energy, then you need to use it as a heater or, for example, integrate it into aircraft engines, then they will burn fuel much better. Ball lightning can be considered as an object on which complex phenomena of a hydrodynamic nature can be studied.
The most curious thing is when the ball lightning appears from the sockets. The question arises: if it were purely plasma, then it would not be able to fly out of the socket. Instantly, the positive and negative charges would recombine, and the outlet would immediately explode. And then it turns out that it creeps out on some thin threads, luminous streams, and then they form a ball. This process is extremely interesting. And practically nothing is known about him. And everything rests on the fact that such an experiment cannot be repeated. No idea how to reproduce this.
- Why no lightning rods protect against this type of lightning?
- Lightning rods, on the contrary, just attract ball lightning. So they protect in a way. If the lightning rod is located next to the living quarters, then this protects the living quarters from lightning penetration into the house itself. At one time, Mikhail Lomonosov and Heinrich Richman decided to measure the cloud charge. Richmann launched a kite during a thunderstorm to a cloud, and attached a string to an electroscope with large blades. A discharge occurred and a ball appeared on the electroscope, which separated from the blades and hit Richman. Richman was killed. We can say that this is the first scientific observation of ball lightning. It is immediately clear that ball lightning appears during a thunderstorm, in the presence of highly charged objects. This was the 18th century, people were so frightened of such manifestations of electricity that they stopped researching atmospheric electricity for a whole century.
Give up hope to everyone who meets her?
- A person always dies when he collides with ball lightning?
- No not always. As with linear lightning. There is such a person by the name of Silagadze, a former paratrooper, who was struck by fireball five times. And he survived.
In fact, ball lightning often only hurts people. There are far fewer murders. She is considered not a very scary object. Although it must be said that ball lightning, getting on an airplane, often destroys electronics. I have been collecting data on aircraft, fireballs have hit or penetrated aircraft about 50 times. And in five cases, fireballs knocked out electronics, and planes fell. These are mainly jet military aircraft. The pilots ejected. In civilian aircraft, they typically enter through the cockpit, pass through the cabin, and exit through the tail.
- There are cases when ball lightning appears in dry and hot weather.
- This is a big mystery. But you also need to understand the following: there are geotectonic phenomena, when some rock shifts occur, and strong local electric fields appear, as a result of which luminous objects can appear. And also, for example, in one area of Moscow there is a thunderstorm, but in another area there is no thunderstorm. Ball lightning can develop a speed of the order of hundreds of meters per second and after a few seconds it can appear in an area where there is no thunderstorm.
- How do you feel about the fact that after a ball lightning strike people become psychics, they see, hear, feel something?
- People begin to possess special abilities not only after meeting with ball lightning, but when they get an electric shock, when a linear lightning strike hits. The physiological effect of electric current and charge is quite strong. It can modify neural connections in the human brain, and information will be transformed in a completely different way, it can change the biochemistry of processes occurring in the body … As a result, previously hidden abilities awaken.