What are some natural phenomena on earth that are beyond the imagination of ordinary people?
Red spirits, blue jets, giant jets, circular discharges, from the names of these transient luminous events (TLE) that occur in the middle and upper atmospheres, show how incredible people feel about this kind of luminous form of strange and incomparably huge, spreading tens or hundreds of kilometers of transient discharge phenomenon. If you are lucky enough, you can also observe these rare natural phenomena on land, and I don't know how many legends have been born from them throughout the ages.
1. Red Sprites
Also known as red flash or sprite (lightning), there is a subtitle group that translates it as "ghost flash".
This spectacular discharge phenomenon in the upper atmosphere seems to date back to a small note on pages 195-196 of a book by the German historian Johann Georg Esto. Around 1730, Esto's teacher suggested that he pay attention to the "coelo tristi" in the sad sky (not sure what this means, who can read the contents of the book and tell you about it). Did his teacher's hint mean this phenomenon, and if so, how did he know? May have seen it and it is difficult to determine, so it can only be implied).
Hinting, Esto one day ascended to the highest peak of the Vogelsberg Mountains (more than 700 meters), and he crossed the thunderstorm clouds to reach the summit and saw the blue sky and white clouds overhead, from where the flash of light rose directly into the sky and then shot to the ground.
Charles Wilson, a Scottish physicist who won the Nobel Prize, proposed in 1925 that in theory, under the meteorological conditions of large-scale thunderstorms, discharges may also occur in the upper atmosphere. Sporadic eyewitness reports have been documented as anecdotes since 1886, and in the decades since the beginning of World War I, some pilots have reported observing bizarre flashes of light, but are often thought to be the result of their hallucinations or even fears. These high-altitude discharges were ignored for more than a hundred years, when it was thought that intense atmospheric discharge activity could only occur in the troposphere, whereas both the stratosphere and the mesosphere atmosphere were electrically calm.
It was not until 1989 that the University of Minnesota was testing a low-light camera for an upcoming rocket launch that it unexpectedly found that two bright beams of light had been captured, and this huge discharge image that occurred 250 kilometers away over the thunderstorm cloud was captured by chance, becoming the first factual evidence of the existence of the phenomenon of mid-atmospheric discharge. In the following years, it was named "Red Sprites" according to its luminous color and elusive characteristics, and this unexpected discovery completely changed the understanding of the interaction between electrical activity in the troposphere and the optical phenomenon of the middle atmosphere, which aroused widespread attention and interest in the study of upper atmospheric physics, but a complete theory that could explain this phenomenon well has not yet been established.
Due to the limitation of ground observations by factors such as distance, field of view and luminosity, in 1994, the University of Alaska in the United States used two aircraft at an altitude of 10 to 75 kilometers at an altitude of 10 to 10,000 meters to cross the Sprite, and obtained color images above the thunderstorm clouds for the first time through high-speed low-light cameras and image enhancers.
This huge luminous space occupies more than 10,000 cubic kilometers of atmosphere, and its uppermost halo is distributed at a height of 88 to 95 kilometers, the red luminous body in the middle is distributed in 66 to 74 kilometers, and the lower tendrils are distributed in 40 to 60 kilometers, and the upper part is red, turns purple downwards and finally turns blue. Over the years, thousands of images have been obtained from ground-based observatories, aircraft, and space stations. The two images below were taken on the International Space Station in 2015, and the image of the red elves is very clear under the white flash of thunderstorm activity.
Images taken on the ground.
Taken at the ESO Observatory in Chile, the image is a secondary composition over a 21-minute period.
The picture below is very magical, a photographer was going to take some lightning images, but unexpectedly captured 6 times the red sprite.
Watching the original video is even more shocking, although the huge red flash above the clouds is fleeting, but it can be seen very clearly, as if it were an event outside the sky (note that there are two times at 21 and 24 seconds).
The red sprites present a huge and faint flash, which is considered to be a positive polar streamer, their brightness is equivalent to that of the medium brightness aurora, but the duration is very short and only a few milliseconds or tens to hundreds of milliseconds; the elves are mostly excited by the positive charge in the thunderstorm cloud at a height of about 70 kilometers, and then rapidly develop downward at a speed of about 10,000 kilometers per second, and the positive flash accounts for only 10% of the total flash, and the lightning between the clouds and in the clouds accounts for the vast majority, so the probability of the red elves occurring is relatively small 3. Very random. The size and shape of the elves vary greatly, but most of them are columnar and carrot-like with tendrils, and the jellyfish elves are very large (about 48 kilometers in circumference), and the elves usually span a range of 50 to 90 kilometers in height.
2. Blue Jets
The blue jets are inverted, thinly conical in shape, and propagate upwards from the top of cumulonimbus clouds at a speed of about 100 kilometers per second until they begin to dissipate at an altitude of 40 to 50 kilometers, lasting about 200 to 300 milliseconds. Their production does not appear to be directly related to lightning, but appears to be related to strong hail activity in thunderstorm clouds. The Blue Jet was first observed in 1989 by a space shuttle as it passed over Australia, a very rare phenomenon of mid-atmospheric discharge, with 56 cases captured at the University of Alaska in 1994 in a study of red elves by aircraft.
A very fortunate astronomy enthusiast @ Phoebe Common In the moonlight on August 13, 2016, while watching and photographing the Perseid meteor shower with friends, I saw and recorded the rare natural wonders of this life above the thunderstorm clouds in the distance, which is much lower than the probability of winning the lottery.
This is probably the best image of the blue jet ever captured.
We can't be sure if the ancients ever saw this kind of fleeting strange celestial phenomenon, but we don't know whether in their eyes it was a god or a dragon flying in the sky.
Or did this guy smash it with a hammer?
3. Gigantic Jet
This is a much rarer phenomenon, similar to the blue jet, but the giant jet can extend from the top of the thunderstorm cloud all the way up to an altitude of 70 to 90 km to the bottom of the ionosphere.
4. Toroidal Discharge (ELVES)
Also known as "naughty elves".
This phenomenon is invisible to the naked eye, because it usually lasts only 1 millisecond, occurs in the ionosphere 100 kilometers above the thunderstorm cloud, and is a circular discharge phenomenon with a diameter of up to 200 to 600 kilometers and a dim flash. It was first discovered in 1990 and was also photographed by the space shuttle during its flight around the earth. Its full name is Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations from Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.
The picture above was taken by a Taiwanese satellite.
While it is almost impossible to observe on land, the energy of amateurs is extremely powerful, even if this strange sight can only exist instantaneously in a thousandth of a second. Below is a Czech amateur astronomer Martin Popek used a low-light camera on the night of April 2, 2017, to photograph the 300-kilometer-sized donut above a distant thunderstorm cloud, and he photographed not only two circular discharges, but also one red genie.
The Finnish enthusiast Timo Kantola is even more bullish, and in 2009 he photographed images of the ring discharge appearing with the red sprite.
Buy a low-light camera, or just watch with the naked eye, according to the accurate weather forecast, in a dark night, choose an observation site 200 to 300 kilometers away from the thunderstorm cloud, good visibility; lock your eyes on the thunderstorm cloud, do not be distracted by lightning, it is best to use a piece of black paper or something to block the lightning, to ensure that the line of sight is focused on the things that will happen above the clouds; enough patience will be rewarded, At least the probability of seeing the red sprite is greater than the probability of seeing a meteor, and if you are lucky enough, you can see the blue jet, if you find a giant jet...
In 2004, Taiwan launched a satellite, Formosa 2, carrying the world's first high-altitude atmospheric lightning imager to be used to observe transient luminescence events from the satellite. By the end of 2012, 1945 cases of red sprites, 1812 cases of genie halos, 21837 cases of ELVES, 3799 cases of blue jets, and only 92 cases of giant jets were recorded.
Since the red genie phenomenon was first de facto confirmed in 1989, the study of global atmospheric circuits such as "ionosphere-thunderstorm-surface-sunny atmosphere" has become more complicated, such as the fact that giant jets of positive polarity may charge global circuits, discharge negative polarity, coupled with known or unknown effects such as charged particles of the solar wind, the action of the Earth's magnetic field and Schumann resonance, making the Earth's electromagnetic field environment and its effects complex, and these unimaginable natural phenomena are also amazing
Reprinted from zhihu