Photographer records one of the rarest and most exotic rays on the planet

One of the rarest and highest rays in the world was recorded by a photographer from Puerto Rico, an American region in the Caribbean, last Monday (20). The image is described as one of the most incredible shots ever of giant jet-shaped rays with fireballs.

“Lightning on Earth is getting weirder,” the scientist described in NASA Tony Phillips It is dedicated to monitoring this type of phenomenon. NS Puerto Rican photographer Frankie Lucina He pointed his Sony A7s camera at an electrical storm at sea and ended up getting the rare visual record of the phenomenon. “This giant plasma jet event occurred during a very strong storm near the Virgin Islands, just prior to Tropical Storm Peter,” Lucina said. “I can’t believe I was able to capture such amazing detail,” he revealed with astonishment.

Sometimes I calledThe highest lightning on earth“Because they reach the ionosphere at an altitude of more than 80 kilometers, giant shapes of luminous planes were discovered near Taiwan and Puerto Rico in 2001 and 2002. Since then, only dozens of giant planes have been photographed in the atmosphere. It appears: “It appears They love storms over water and are notorious for surprising passengers on commercial airliners.”

In 2017 and 2018, the world of radiology Oscar van der VeldeGive Polytechnic University of Catalonia, high-speed cameras have been installed on the northern coast of Colombia in a survey intended to capture giant aircraft. In three months of observation, he managed to capture only twelve,

Frankie took pictures of a rare giant jet plane with the ‘carrot’ morphology, first reported in a A study published in Nature by Su et al (2003)“The other, more common jet type has the shape of a ‘tree,'” van der Velde notes. ‘Carrot jets’ are distinguished by their inner spheres, i.e., glowing balls of light hundreds of meters wide. Lucina’s record of dozens of them lights up the middle of the jet.

The process of formation and structure of these atmospheric discharges is not yet fully understood by science, as is the rarity of this phenomenon. “It could be plasma flows within the jet crossing or higher heating regions”, says the degassing researcher from the Catalan University. “We don’t know,” says van der Velde. The researcher explained, “Giant jets cannot be picked up easily by a spectrometer. This is the brightest giant jet I have ever seen. It was really cool.”

Rare rays in Rio Grande do Sul

Rare atmospheric discharges forming above storm clouds that are barely observable visually have already been documented in Rio Grande do Sul. Torres photographer Gabriel Zaparoli has occasionally recorded sprite-like rays in the atmosphere over the northern coastal municipality of Rio Grande do Sul. .

Gabriel Zaparoli / Personal archive

Orcs are a strange form of electricity that rises from storm clouds instead of descending like regular lightning. Although sprites have been reported for at least a century, many scientists didn’t believe they existed until 1989, when sprites were mistakenly photographed by researchers at the University of Minnesota and confirmed by video cameras aboard NASA’s space shuttle. they are Transient light events Or TLEs, from English Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), are atmospheric phenomena observed above storm clouds at altitudes between 18 and 100 km, associated with roughly electrostatic fields from lightning.

The basic physics of orcs is not yet fully understood by science. Some models claim that cosmic rays contribute to their occurrence by creating conductive pathways in the atmosphere. Subatomic particles from deep space will reach the top of Earth’s atmosphere, producing secondary electrons that shoot the rays upward. If true, orcs could reproduce more and more as cosmic rays intensified as solar activity decreased.