[meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab

From: Rob McCafferty <rob_mccafferty_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:05:17 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <849034.50308.qm_at_web50913.mail.yahoo.com>

Is this really new stuff? I watched "Bolas Luminosas"
and they looked almost identical to something I saw
years ago on some BBC documentary about lightning.
Some Scientist used a couple of hundred Decomissioned
submarine batteries to generate sparks and got the
same effect. I remember showing the video to kids I
taught 7-8 years ago.

Rob McC


--- Martin Altmann <altmann at meteorite-martin.de>
wrote:

>
> They look like the ideal pets for Dave Harris in the
> video....
>
> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
> [mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com]
> Im Auftrag von Ron
> Baalke
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. Januar 2007 18:50
> An: Meteorite Mailing List
> Betreff: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In
> The Lab
>
>
>
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500
>
> Lightning balls created in the lab
> Hazel Muir
> New Scientist
> 10 January 2007
>
> Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a
> mystery, now that a team
> in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making
> similar eerie orbs of
> light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around
> for several
> seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here.
> <http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php>
>
> Thousands of people have reported seeing ball
> lightning, a luminous
> sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms.
> It is typically the
> size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or
> minutes, sometimes
> hovering, even bouncing along the ground.
>
> One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the
> screen door of a
> house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and
> wreck an old mangle,
> while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a
> Russian teacher's
> head more than 20 times before vanishing.
>
> One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly
> ionised blob of
> plasma held together by its own magnetic fields,
> while an exotic
> explanation claims the cause is mini black holes
> created in the big bang.
>
> A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John
> Abrahamson and James
> Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in
> Christchurch, New Zealand, is
> that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes
> soil, turning any
> silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the
> vapour 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 team led by Antonio Pavao and
> Gerson Paiva from the
> Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took
> wafers of silicon just
> 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two
> electrodes and zapped
> them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a
> couple of seconds,
> 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. "The luminous balls seem to be alive," says
> Pavao. He says
> their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed
> to jerk them
> forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that
> formed spiral shapes,
> suggesting the balls were spinning. From their
> blue-white or
> orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that
> they have a temperature
> of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt
> plastic, and one
> even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans.
>
> These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls
> ever made in the lab.
> Earlier experiments using microwaves created
> luminous balls
> but they disappeared milliseconds after the
> microwaves were switched off.
>
> "The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred
> or more times higher
> than that obtained by microwaves," says Pavao, whose
> findings will
> appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is
> thrilled. "It made my
> year when I heard about it," he says. "The balls,
> although still small,
> lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of
> observed natural ball
> lightning."
>
> Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical
> reactions involved in
> the balls' formation, and experimenting with other
> materials that might
> work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur
> compounds.
>
> >From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 10
> January 2007, page 12
>
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Received on Thu 11 Jan 2007 09:05:17 PM PST