Images of blue lightning in space captured in February 2019 are making the rounds on the internet after finding mention in a new study.
The image in question is from thunderclouds above the Pacific island of Nauru. Last week, a paper published in Nature shed light on this phenomenon.
Spearheaded by the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), the team used a collection of cameras with visible and ultraviolet spectrum light detectors, along with X-ray and gamma-ray detectors to fish out electrical interactions that take place above thunderclouds.
The goal was to capture space lightning blue jet, along with four complementing flashes on the top the clouds.
These stormy flashes stayed in the first layer of the atmosphere called troposphere instead of settling in the second layer of the atmosphere called stratosphere.
Blue jets continue to remain elusive to scientists, but they believe it’s a result of electric breakdown which takes place between positively charged and negatively charged sections of storm clouds.
The four small flashes that joined the blue jet are commonly known as elves, which stands for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.
Elves are essentially flashes of light that are produced when negatively charged electrons are pushed through a part of the atmosphere known as ionosphere by radio waves.
Blue jets still remain largely misunderstood, and there’s a lot that we still don’t know about these beautiful light shows.
But what is blue lightning? It simply refers to thunderstorms outside of our vision from Earth, which may be visible from space.
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