The strange phenomenon that scientists from the United States of America stumbled upon while studying the mechanism of lightning formation in thunderclouds is the opposite of the generally accepted view of the occurrence of lightning discharges.
The material in the scientific publication Nature Communications is devoted to the discovery of American scientists.
According to the authors of the study, employees of the Center for Space Sciences at New Hampshire University, we are talking about the so-called rapid negative decay - this physical process was a complete surprise for researchers who believed that the mechanism of lightning formation had already been fully studied. In reality, it turned out that scientists do not know everything about lightning.
“Despite the fact that lightning has been studied for two hundred and fifty years, the mechanism of the formation of discharges is still largely a mystery. But now that we have studied fast negative decay, we have some understanding of the processes that actually accompany the appearance of lightning,”says Ningyu Liu, professor of physics and lead author of the study.
The co-author of the study, PhD Julia Tilles, notes that the process of lightning formation can be bidirectional - that is, in addition to the rapid positive decay, which physicists have known for a long time, fast negative decay also plays an important role in the occurrence of discharges.
Kolesnikov Andrey