"Gigantic Jets" Blast Electricity Into the Ionosphere 168
New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."
I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, so where's the ball lightning? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've discovered, documented, and explained a major new form of lightning that, previous poster notwithstanding, hadn't even really been rumored until recently. So where are the videos and large-scale studies and quantitative models for ball lightning, which has been "generally accepted as real" for well over a hundred years?
Seriously, come on. We've got millions of hours of footage of lightning, tornadoes, meteors, and even rarer and more transient phenomena. But, as far as I know, there isn't one single unambiguous high-quality video of ball lightning "in the wild". So why are we still giving it the benefit of the doubt? How many years will it have to evade our ubiquitous cameras before we just stop believing in it?
I can recall (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sprites (Score:2, Interesting)
I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible."
Hallelujah. Some time during the 20th century (or maybe the late 19th century) we decided that we knew mostly anything about everything, and we "froze" our conception of what is possible or impossible. A great parallel and maybe one reason for that attitude is that we live in closed world that we have entirely mapped. No more "HERE BE DRAGONS" on maps, we've seen it all, there's no mystery, no Atlantis, no big cave leading to the centre of the Earth, no lost 7th continent, and so on... And I think that it's something that anyone can confirm. Deep down, you know we know mostly everything about anything. You know there's no such things as ghosts, witches, mysterious dragons, angels, giant sea serpents, mole people, space aliens roaming our atmosphere, reincarnation, because what you really think is, if any such thing really existed, we would surely know by now.
So that's a problem we now have, we tend to think that we've reached the end of things to discover, at least when it comes to what goes on on our closed world that is our planet, and therefore our conception of reality is frozen. And the real problem is, when something challenges that frozen conception of reality, we'll reject it, blindly. Airplane pilots who've seen impossible flying objects must have been confused, people who say they were abducted by aliens must be mad, children who talk about previous lives must be confabulating, people who communicate with the dead are all charlatans, and people who say they saw a mythical monster like Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster should perhaps lay off the sauce. It doesn't matter how compelling the evidence is, it doesn't matter if 1,000 people report the same thing, because we're reasonable people, and as such we all know what's possible from what's impossible, and that what's impossible is impossible, and it will never change.
Re:I can recall (Score:2, Interesting)
pilots in the 60 who spoke quietly about these. Of course, scientists said that no such thing exists and as such, most pilots kept real quiet about it. Only at wild 60's parties would I hear some of these guys talking about it.
Maybe an even larger, as yet undiscovered type of these ""gigantic jets" can be used to explain the images taken from the shuttle, Mir space station etc. orbiting earth that clearly show something (an object) leaving the earth's atmosphere, and which have for a long time - at least in particular circles - been used to 'prove' the existence of UFOs on earth. If the jets in the article can reach 80km, could it not be possible that some as yet undiscovered phenomena could reach even higher, with enough power to break through the ionosphere into outer space?
Re:Sprites (Score:5, Interesting)
My father flew F-102's, the first supersonic aircraft commissioned for battle by the US Air Force. If you get the "official" Air Force post card of the F-102, my dad's flying it. He flew Delta jets later until he retired a few years ago. He told me about red-coloured lightning going up from clouds into the sky when I was a kid (1970's), and the other pilots also knew about them, too. Are these the same as the "sprites" mentioned here?
Re:Sprites (Score:4, Interesting)