Radio telescope helped solve the mystery of the formation of lightning

Despite the seemingly long-studied natural phenomenon such as lightning, the process of generation and propagation of an electric discharge in the atmosphere remained far from being as clear as it was believed in society. A group of European scientists led by specialists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) could to shed light on the detailed processes of the formation of a lightning discharge and used for this a very unusual instrument - a radio telescope.

A significant array of antennas of the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope is located on the territory of the Netherlands, although thousands of antennas are also distributed over a large area of ​​Europe. Cosmic radiation is captured by antennas and then analyzed. To study lightning, scientists first decided to use LOFAR and got amazing results. After all, lightning is accompanied by radio frequency radiation and may well be detected by antennas with good resolution: up to 1 meter in space and with a frequency of one signal per microsecond. It turned out that a powerful astronomical instrument can tell in detail about the phenomenon that occurs literally under the noses of earthlings.

According to these links You can see 3D modeling the process of formation of lightning discharges. The radio telescope helped to show for the first time the formation of newly discovered lightning "needles" - a previously unknown type of lightning discharge propagation through a positively charged plasma channel. Each such needle can be up to 400 meters long and up to 5 meters in diameter. It was the “needles” that explained such a phenomenon as multiple lightning strikes in the same place in an extremely short time. After all, the charge accumulated in the clouds is not discharged once, which would be logical from the point of view of well-known physics, but hits the ground more than once or twice - many discharges occur in a fraction of a second.

As the picture from the radio telescope showed, the "needles" propagate perpendicular to the positively charged plasma channels and, thereby, return part of the charge to the cloud that generated the lightning discharge. According to scientists, it is precisely this behavior of positively charged plasma channels that explains the hitherto obscure details in the behavior of lightning.

Source: 3dnews.ru