An amateur astronomer has filmed a rare near-earth phenomenon - the appearance of sprites.
Red ghosts are captured by the camera of Paul Smith from Oklahoma, USA. There - in Oklahoma - he filmed. The shooting was posted on Facebook. Ghosts - aka sprites - appeared during a thunderstorm on July 14, 2018.
Paul assures us that thunderstorms and sprites are walking nearby. More precisely, one above the other. Thunderstorms are low, red ghosts are high, about 50 kilometers above the Earth. In the North of the United States, it is now thunderstorm season, and therefore sprite season.
Sprites have something to do with ordinary thunderstorms.
The nature of sprites is still mysterious. Until recently, they did not believe in them at all, although pilots from time to time reported about some bright upward-looking objects observed in the upper atmosphere. Scientists equated such evidence with UFO reports.
The first confirmation that ghosts really exist, and do not dream appeared in the 1970s. And only at the beginning of this century, scientists managed to get images of mysterious objects, which were called sprites.
It turned out that sprites appear in near space, where there are no thunderclouds. And it seems that nothing should sparkle. However, it sparkles, indicating a certain stormy life.
It is incredibly difficult to spot the ghostly inhabitants of near-earth space - they are too swift. Shown for thousandths of a second.
Promotional video:
Several years ago, a group of meteorologists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks managed to shoot sprites on a high-speed camera, which did 10 thousand frames per second. This allowed for the first time to consider the previously hidden details of the phenomenon.
Scientists have seen that giant - the size of a football field - fireballs dancing in the jets. First, they fly vertically down, then up. The speed is crazy - one tenth the speed of light.
A phenomenon captured from a high-altitude aircraft.
The movement inside the sprites was later captured by Israeli researchers from the Tel Aviv University in Israel. They are
confirmed the presence of balls. But we noticed another surprising feature of their behavior. The balls, it turns out, don't just jump about 15 kilometers, but line up in a circle. It turns out a kind of round dance with a diameter of 50-70 kilometers.
“From a distance, this ghost dance could be mistaken for a flying saucer,” explained Tel Aviv geophysicist Colin Price. “It is possible that many observers, including astronauts and airplane pilots who reported UFOs, actually saw the sprites.
A bunch of sprites might well be mistaken for a flying saucer.
Price believes that the appearance of sprites in space is somehow facilitated by earthly - "lower" - thunderstorms.
“Perhaps lightning discharges excite an electric field in space, which is much higher,” says the scientist.
See a ghost and die
Astronauts of the American space shuttle Columbia, which tragically burned down during landing on February 1, 2003, also tried to photograph ghosts. Specialists found one of them on footage transmitted to Earth a few days before the disaster. The object emitted a powerful red light, shone for a split second and was located over Madagascar at an altitude of 150 kilometers.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY