Ball Lightning Created In the Lab

EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples. From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a movie of the phenomenon.

Slashdotted Video?

[gbulmash (688770)]

Looks like the video link is already Slashdotted. But the video also seems to be all over YouTube (particularly since the story is a few days old). Here's a link to it at YouTube [youtube.com].

Is ball lightning supposed to bounce around the ground like that? I thought it floated. 'Course, I could be mistaken.

- Greg

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

"Ball lightning is also said to have an odd motion such as looping and the appearance of bouncing along the ground." (wikipedia [wikipedia.org])

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[Cyberax (705495)]

I think, it will fly if there's a significant potential difference between the ground and air, as it can be during a thunderstorm when the earth and clouds become like capacitor plates.

In this case a conducting plasma ball will move along the lines of resulting electric field, but because earth landscape is not flat, it will move in rather strange trajectories.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

I think there's some ball lightning coming out of that server.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[marcello_dl (667940)]

> I think there's some ball lightning coming out of that server.

Wouldn't it be a great way to signal excessive load on a server? Except that then microsoft would embrace and extend the idea with ballMer lightning, which also throws chairs at you if it spots license irregularities.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

Ooooh Balmer Lightning - it bounces up and down, shouting "Developers! Developers!"

The Boxen

[kfg (145172)]

I am just a Sun Blade and my story's seldom told
I have squandered my existence on some packets full of numbers such are data files
All porn and jest
Still the NAT hears what it wants to hear
and access denies the rest
Oh yes, access denies the rest

In the NOC there stands a boxen
and a server by its trade
and it carries the reminders
of every luser guest that logged on
and downloaded till it cried out
in its full Slashdotted shame
"My CPU is burning, but the hard drive still remains"
Yes, the data still remains . . .

Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees

KFG

Re:

[Arker (91948)]

It can bounce around, fly through the air, float serenely across the room... it has a very broad repertoire of movements. The behaviour in the video is within the range of reports, so you can't rule it out because of that. The visual appearance of the balls is consistent with the ball lightning I've seen personally, and reports vary widely so far as colour as well as behaviour.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[obender (546976)]

Non Flash version on Google video is here [google.com]

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[PrinceAshitaka (562972)]

IS the scientist in this video wearing flip flops with this ball lightning scurrying around the floor by hiw feet? Is it just me or is this not a good idea. I want to see the blooper reel of this video.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[rucs_hack (784150)]

A friend of mine was swimming in a lake in the eighties and some ball lightening appeared. It bounced along the surface of the lake near him, scaring him and others on the lake beach somewhat as he raced to the shore.

It dissipated shortly after he got out, and he went straight to the lakeside bar to get a drink, touched the proffered glass, and it exploded. Other than that and a healthy dose of 'holy fuck', he had no ill effects.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[Cousin Scuzzy (754180)]

A friend of mine was swimming in a lake in the eighties and some ball lightening appeared.

That's not ball lightening, that's just shrinkage. Happens to men when they're swimming all the time. Usually not when the water's in the eighties though.

It dissipated shortly after he got out

Yeah, that's typical too.

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[rucs_hack (784150)]

it was, according to him, a very hot day, not a storm in sight. He didn't see where it came from, but he said it seemed to be moving towards him till he got out of the water.
Not being too conversant with electromagnetism I couldn't say whether this was because he represented an electrical 'hot spot' on the water or just that he was so freaked he thought it was following him.

It was, so far as he could tell, about a foot across.

Fascinating

[Ceriel Nosforit (682174)]

I find it fascinating that it displays almost no friction to the floor as it moves about. Plus, the gas jets tell of a very complex combination of structure and chemical process occurring.
It will be interesting to read more research on the subject when it becomes available.

Re:

[Circlotron (764156)]

It reminded me of drops of water that float around on a thin cushion of vapour when they are dropped onto a hot metal surface.

Re:Fascinating

[ari wins (1016630)]

So, wait, they've recreated a 6/1 creature with Trample, that takes one red mana to cast, and is placed in the graveyard after this turn is completed?

Just don't tell me when they create a Lord of the Pit, the U.S. has a hard enough time preserving marshland's as it is.

Interesting conversion

[Weaselmancer (533834)]

True. An interesting side effect of all of this is that we now know that 3 red mana = 140 amps.

Hmm? Something is missing

[Werrismys (764601)]

These things stay on ground... when I was a kid I once saw a ball of lightning and it danced along a barbed wire fence. This is a start but not the whole truth...

Re:

[WaZiX (766733)]

The whole truth? Man you've been watching X-files too much!

Try "explanation".

Re:

[Rosco P. Coltrane (209368)]

It could have been St. Elmo's fire [wikipedia.org], since barbed wire has sharp edges.

Having seen 'ball lightning'...

[rindeee (530084)]

...that isn't it. The most accurate description I can give based on the one time I witnessed it is that it looked very similar to the luminescent jellyfish that you might see when boating at night (soft glow, bluish, semi-translucent). That 'look', and the fact that what I saw seemed to 'float' (the video shows something that is most definitely not weightless as it drops and bounces about)leaves me unimpressed. I don't know what causes ball lighting (I'm sure it's rather anticlimactic whatever it is), but this isn't it. Just my two cents.

Re:

[sucker_muts (776572)]

The most accurate description I can give based on the one time I witnessed it is that it looked very similar to the luminescent jellyfish that you might see when boating at night (soft glow, bluish, semi-translucent).

Perhaps because these are tiny lab expirment ones, a real one created with an actual lightning might indeed look quite different. The substance where a real one comes from is normally not a pure silicon based thing.

But I fear this is one of these things that are difficult to recreate accu

Re:Having seen 'ball lightning'...

[Cyberax (705495)]

Of COURSE, it isn't. Because they use energies far less than involved in a real lightning, but they may have found a plausible mechanism for ball lightning.

As I can see in the video, their fireballs move along equipotential curves, i.e. along the lines with the equal electric field. But the electric charge of concrete floor is almost zero, so ball lightning doesn't float too high. In a real thunderstorm there may be potential differenced in ranges of thousand volts per meter.

Re:

[way2trivial (601132)]

I believe you have witnessed his Noodliness.
http://www.venganza.org/ [venganza.org]

I've seen ball lightening

[Centurix (249778)]

I recommend not using nylon sheets, an hours worth of charge really hurts.

Did that in a fireplace

[by Anonymous Coward]

A couple of years ago I tested the fireplace in our just build new house. It is a fireplace which has a glass door to prevent smoke from entering the living room. Between the door and the frame there is a gap of two millimeter wide. I had put in tropical wood, leftovers of a bridge build in our neighborhood. I had set the lever to the extreme and lots of air (oxygen) was flowing in. Suddenly there was an impressive explosion and about a dozen of these pearls flowed through the fireplace. Three of them moved towards the glass door and actually seemed to move through the glass door near the edge of it. The glass door remained intact. I wrote some reports about it and have send them to some scientists working in this field. One of the possible explanations was that the balls might have been fast rotating strings, capable of moving through the gap. It was a wonderful experience which I have not been able to recreate. It very much looks like these balls in the video

Arc welding

[Pouic (1051024)]

It very much looks like liquid metal balls bouncing on the floor, these are produced very often when using an electric arc welder.

Occupational health and safety?

[DeathElk (883654)]

Check out the dude's footwear! Flip flops/thongs/whatever you call 'em don't seem appropriate!

...Only different

[Genda (560240)]

This isn't ball lightning, what's happening here is mostly oxidation...
I remember as a kid, attaching some extra thin solder wire between a couple nails in a small piece of scrap wood attached to a power cord. Plug the cord into the outlet and the solder would explode in a shower of sparks. I'd do this on sheets of butcher paper, because the solder sparks would hit the paper, incandescent white, and bounce around just like the silicon in this demonstration (probably burning both the flux and some of the lead in the solder) leaving behind these intricate little trails all over the paper. At the end, you'd find these tiny little balls of solder (typically 0.4-0.8 mm.) Point is, you'd ionize a little metal, and get that metal (lead or silicon it doesn't matter) to oxidize, and there's clearly a ball of vaporized metal surrounding the burning bit at the middle, but this is not by any stretch anything like ball lightening.

this is NOT it...

[Brane2 (608748)]

Judging from published photos and descriptions of ball lightning phenomena and copy of the video on youtube, this is far from ball lighting.

These things hover over the concrete floor and look like sizzling droplets that can spray around sometimes when welding. It is not unusual to see such hovering drops as they vaporize water in the floor beneath them and so create some kind of gas cushion- hovercraft effect.

Genuine ball lightnings has been reported able to hover in the air, sometimes at considerable height and it was not always blindingly bright...

Re:

[javaxjb (931766)]

I wouldn't be so quick to discount this as a major source of many instances of ball lightning. For starters, Silicon is the most common solid element on Earth, so there is plenty around. And I see no reason to think that Silicon would be the only element or molecule that could produce this effect. Also, the experimenters are also dealing with much less energy than a real lightning strike and much purer silicon than lightning would hit. Given higher energy (heat) and less silicon you might see something that

I want names

[lohphat (521572)]

"Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang"

I want their names -- show me a scientist who would publicly postulate this.

Re:I want names

[Quelain (256623)]

That sounds like this New Scientist article:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/m g19225831.700 [newscientist.com]

The same guy also talks about ball lightning due to neutrinos here:

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=88edua 1k [holoscience.com]

Pace VanDevender

[brian0918 (638904)]

Pace VanDevender [sandia.gov], a plasma physicist who used to be the VP of the organization I worked in at Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM. He gave a fascinating talk on ball lightning a couple summers ago, and he seems like an all-round brilliant guy. As for the ball lightning created in the Brazilian lab, this doesn't seem to have any of the physical properties of observed ball lightning (except that it's a glowing ball). The ball lightning that has been observed is much larger (up to a meter or more wide), last

inventing things out of order

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Magic Missile should've been invented first! It's gonna take forever for me to get enough experience to get this...

Re:inventing things out of order

[Barny (103770)]

What amazed me was that they cast it without using any red mana!

Bloody type one decks :/

Re:

[Arker (91948)]

Magic missile was invented LONG ago man, where you been?

Here [researchpress.co.uk] is one of the earliest versions.

I'm pretty sure

[Rogerborg (306625)]

that no scientist has ever proposed singularities as the source of ball lightning.

Old hat?

[Air-conditioned cowh (552882)]

I was surprised that artificial ball lightning is considered so elusive. I thought it could be done in a Microwave [airnet.com.au] oven [angelfire.com]. I'm sure I can remember some more serious experiments being reported on Slashdot too. Maybe someone can find them.

Re:

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

I saw it on TV 20 years ago. It's really easy - if you simulate lightning (there are whole warehouses built that can do this) then occasinally you will get something exactly like the effect shown.

Re:Old hat?

[madaxe42 (690151)]

Yep - easiest way to make ball lightning - light a wide based candle, without any metal in it (no tea-lights!), place it in the microwave, in the middle of the plate. Nuke. Plasma ball appears, candle goes out, and plasma ball remains. Turn off microwave, the plasma stays a few seconds, before descending back into the candle.

Still not right

[mustafap (452510)]

This is no explaination for the phenomenon. Soil? Lasting 8 seconds?

I have a personal experience of ball lighting and it completely contradicts the results suggested.

I was 10 years old ( 32 years ago ) living in an urban town in Crawley, UK. There was a heavy thunderstorm - which I should point out would be a minor storm relative to other countries. It was about 9pm at night.

My brother and I had been in bed in our rooms when my mother came up to us and brought us downstairs. She saw visibly upset by something ( I still recall the event clearly now, for that reason ).

Her explaination was that she had been reading when she saw a ball of light, about the size of a grapefruit, arise slowly from the telephone. It hovered at about chest height for a while and hen slow drift towards the closed kitchen door. It dissipated when it came into contact with the door.

That description doesn't tie up with a bit of soil igniting and burning for a few seconds.

I don't believe there is anything mystical about this phenomenon but I don't buy this work as being an explaination for it.

right...

[fester2001 (1051032)]

the real question is why would you be waring thongs with burning balls running around your feet

This has been done for over 2 decades already

[InterGuru (50986)]

Twenty years ago I visited Paul M. Koloc in his garage in College Park Md., watching his Plasmak machine produce ball lightning. He is still working on and improving it.

Check it out at here [prometheus2.net] .

The next obvious step

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

A ball lightning gun!

Flight EA539

[evilviper (135110)]

Nothing new...

There have ALWAYS been numerous theories, and numerous tests, which could explain a FEW of the properties of ball lightning, but never ALL of them.

A gas ball sounds good, except for numerous accounts of ball lightning traveling THROUGH solid objects (comming out the other side) all without causing ANY damage to the stationary object at all. How does burning silicon gas do that?

How does this burning gas ball slowly float inches away from people, and not cause them to feel the intense heat from the object?

And how does silicon gas (from a ground lightning strike) suddenly appear floating down the isle of a commercial aircraft in-flight?

March 19, 1963
Eastern Airlines Flight EA539
From New York to Washington

Five minutes past midnight, the plane encountered a storm. There's a loud bang and a bright flash. Seconds later a glowing ball emerges from the pilots cabin. The blue light ball hovers above the isle and floats slowly towards the rear of the plane. It reaches the back of the plane and vanishes. Remarkably, the plane continues unharmed.
(National Geographic: Naked Science)

Re:Obligatory statement

[anagama (611277)]

Don't worry, this is ball lightening, not ball lighting.

Re:

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

I guess you eunux greybeards knew all about that...once.

Re:

[Dance_Dance_Karnov (793804)]

But could Koreans eat them?

America

[mangu (126918)]

Actually, Brazil is part of the original America, the USA isn't. Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the continents are named, never visited North America, his travels were limited to the coast of what is now Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. In the first maps of the "new world" only the southern continent had a name and it was "America" [about.com].