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]

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]

"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:Having seen 'ball lightning'...

[sucker_muts]

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 accurately...

Re:Slashdotted Video?

[obender]

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

I'm pretty sure

[Rogerborg]

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

Re:I want names

[Quelain]

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]

Re:Hmm? Something is missing

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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

America

[mangu]

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].

This has been done for over 2 decades already

[InterGuru]

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] .

Pace VanDevender

[brian0918]

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), lasts for much longer (minutes/hours), seems to float or move in *any* direction at "will" (unlike this stuff, which just moves like a marble dropped on the floor), and most importantly, is capable of seemingly passing through some objects while completely obliterating others. One possibility is that there are multiple classes of what we would call "ball lightning", each with their own unrelated cause.