Almost all galactic matter, including stars, the interstellar, interplanetary medium, the upper layers of the planetary atmospheres, is in a plasma state. The processes of energy transitions from one state to another also have a plasma origin, which is especially characteristic of active processes in stars.
In the northern latitudes of Russia, radiance magical in terms of colors looks enchanting. In the northwest, in particular in St. Petersburg and the surrounding area, even in the glorious times of Peter I, plasma, which was given the collective name of heavenly arsonists, once set off a grand fire, setting fire to not all wooden buildings, but by some unthinkable choice.
THE SUPRIST OF FIRE TORCHES
A series of mysterious arson attacks covered the young capital of Peter the Great in 1718. The autocrat immediately issued a formidable, in his spirit, a decree, ordering all people, regardless of class, against the fiery torches to fix the search for the causes and decisive extinguishing of fires. He himself witnessed how clots of red-green fire were “thrown out” from heaven, when at night, driving a carriage, he returned from the shipyards.
Most of all, Peter I was surprised then that the torches-arsonists seemed to be led by a malicious hand, for the fireballs, scattering like fireflies, lay exclusively on the boards, not covered with tiles, burning, setting fires in the inner chambers.
Due to the blackness of the pre-winter night, one could only guess that the fire is of heavenly origin. Therefore, at first the emperor suspected a certain intruder, activating flamethrowers - a kind of missiles used in European armies.
On the night of November 22-23, being in the open air, the autocrat abandoned the idea of enemy intrigues, because he was observing a spectacle, magical in beauty. In the light of the moon, in the absence of clouds, myriads of fireballs rushed down from the heights. This time, being the size of a pea, they did not set fire to anything, but, in contact with the skin of people, they caused painful burns like mosquito bites.
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THE FLAMING WATER OF THE SEA
If someone said that water can be set on fire, that it can burn with a bright flame, he would be considered either a dreamer or insane. Everything, however, is not so simple. Thousands of Parisians at night, in early November 1718, when the Seine breathed an excess of water, saw how the river threw out tongues of hot flame, when clots of fire, mistaken for shooting stars, whipped dense shrapnel over the seething clay water.
The notorious collector of all sorts of curious facts that do not fit into everyday reality, the writer Charles Fort, who in the 20s of the last century extracted information about river water "extremely flammable" from the old Parisian periodicals, offered his own version: "No, no water, of course, did not burn. It's just that in the upper layers of the atmosphere a large meteorite crumbled into small fractions heated to critical temperatures. Falling into the Seine, this space debris, cooling down, created the complete illusion of burning water. If we add the flood of that time, apocalyptic pictures formed in the imagination of the nervous townspeople."
Fort's point of view is doubtful to modern astrophysicists. Most of them are inclined to believe that Europe and part of Russia in the 20s of the 18th century were covered by stable plasma clots - messengers of the anomalously active Sun. However, this is also only a hypothesis that has the right to exist, just like the hypothesis that the pieces of fiery matter were manifested as a result of shifts in the earth's crust.
Questioning these two points of view, back in 1931, the French historian of Russian origin Julius Gorin left some interesting lines: “As a child, in the Rostov province, I happened to be under fire from ball lightning, in the form of half-meter icicles and perfectly round, the size of a walnut, balls. All this fiery "mud" had the property of adhering tightly to literally everything - liquid, solid, indiscriminately. As a result, the village and the estate of the great-grandfather “Gorki” burned down. It was in 1911”.
TAIGA FIREFALL
Leading six expeditions to the places of the alleged fall of the Tunguska meteorite, Leonid Alekseevich Kulik, while wandering through the taiga in the period from 1937 to 1939, together with the expedition members, twice observed the "convergence" of plasma formations. Kulik gives an interesting testimony from the local hunter Ivan Prokhorov, who, as a teenager, in 1907, in a panic, watched the fiery drops that set fire to the straw huts and haystacks. “It was as bright as day,” the old hunter recalled, bright and scary.
Later, when the fire went away, according to Prokhorov, who took refuge with his peers near the swamps, the adults who remained in the incinerated village saw fiery marks of crosses and some incomprehensible signs in the black sky under the stars. “Fiery traces and crosses,” Kulik is sure, “these are only visions - a consequence of an over-excited and upset psyche.”
A few years later, a skeptical attitude towards fiery visions "punished" Kulik. Being in the people's militia, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, shortly after his death from typhus, Leonid Alekseevich and his comrades in arms over the positions at night for two minutes watched the vertical rotation of the fiery projection of signs, "akin to kabbalistic or hieroglyphic." Then a hot red haze descended on the trenches. “Is it really some kind of plasma,” the scientist wondered. And he offered the answer: "Nature is miraculous for the time being with unresolved material secrets."