Lightening : A Natural Phenomenon

What's In This Article...

1. Lightening
2. Our distance from lightening

Lightning

Lightning, Thunder and Terror.

It seems very interesting and thrilling when we see lightning during thunderstorms in the sky. Many people are afraid of lightning and thunder sounds.

Here’s a shocking fact about lightning.

“Lightning is 3 times hotter than the outer surface of the Sun, which is known as Corona.” Isn’t that why whenever lightning falls on a tree, that tree gets burned up into charcoal.

Lightning is generally lines of electrons or flow of electron from higher potential region to lower potential region that forms due to some static and dynamic charge distributions in our environment (atmosphere or near Earth’s surface).

The flow of these electrons is very sudden and as the charge difference between two regions becomes zero or nearly zero, the lightning stops (here you have to use the algebraic sum, as charge is a scalar quantity). But there is a continuous dynamic charge allocation due to bad weather conditions. As the environment comes to a steady state, the discrete distribution of dynamic charges slows down to minimal and it is the reason why there is no lightning after bad weather ends.

One more thing you may notice is why static charges don’t create lightning as they are present even after the bad weather ends?

Note: Only electrons can flow but protons can’t, this is the case in metals but in the atmosphere, everything is random.

Another question arises from here.

If Earth can do anything in order to neutralize another system, then why does it not stop bad weather and lightning by neutralizing the dynamic charges even before it takes place?

The answer to this question hides in the fact that air is a bad conductor of electricity, it means that it would restrict the flow of electrons in its region. Therefore, the process of neutralizing thunderstorms is relatively slow and the dynamic charges sometimes helps the Earth (near surface) to neutralize atmosphere as lightning (if lightning gets connected to the Earth’s surface, earthing will happen and to all where the lightning is connected, will get neutralized), but it also creates discrete distribution of charges in the atmosphere which can create a further bad situation. That’s why we say nature is unpredictable.

Our Distance From Lightning

Experiment Topic: To find my distance from lightning.

Principle: Speed of light, speed of sound.

Given: From practical experiments we have found that the gap between 'seeing a light' and 'hearing a sound' is "5 seconds".

Procedure: be ready with an apparatus with which you can count the time period.

Step 1: As you see a lightning in the sky START the stop-clock and carefully wait for the sound to come.

Step 2: As you hear any sound of thunder, immediately pause the time and count the time gap as 'n'.

Step 3: Calculate the distance using this formula.

• distance from you (in miles) = n/5 1 mile = 1.6 km.
• distance in km = (n/5)*(1.6) * = multiplication.

Isn't this experiment interesting?

I guess you can do this now very easily.

Try it whenever you get a chance to see lightning.

It’s not necessary that only the distance of lightning can be calculated using this formula. You can find the distance of anything that produces light and sound at the same time such as fire crackers, you can find the distance of fireworks from yourself.

I think now you have understood completely the practical implementation of this experiment.