What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting | Hacker News Reader

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

quantamagazine.org

238 pointsTomte54 comments

That 7 second video of a small rocket shot into a cloud to induce a lightning strike (about half way down the article) is incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BJIiX9_c_M

Any ideas why the lightning strike appears mostly green (and momentarily purple and orange)?

I'm imagining it's something related to the copper wire.

I always wanted to replicate this with a helium balloon and a long, wet string coated with copper filings.

Maybe just salt water and skip the filings?

Even better, use hydrogen!

Hydrogen string is notoriously hard to tie knots in.

You'd probably need a very large balloon to overcome the weight of the string

Copper emits a green-blue light in the flame test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsexjcROH4

The surrounding air becomes ionized. Since Earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, and ionized nitrogen often emits a purple glow.

Why don't we do this on the norm and somehow harness the energy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy

Prize is too low. Says it only delivers 38 gallons of gas equivalent energy, assuming no loss which there will be.

There are some places that are hit by lighting with high regularity where it might make sense. Lightning rods on tall buildings. Somewhere near here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning

Lighting rods also work by dissipating the local electric potential and reducing the likelihood of a lightning strike. That's why they are pointed, or fractal in the newer ones.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod "and that a considerable electric current can be measured through the conductors as ionization occurs at the point when an electric field is present, such as happens when thunderclouds are overhead."

You can get a ground charge even when thunderclouds aren't present. It just has to be windy. I've always wondered if it was worth collecting this, say with a field with a grid of interconnected lightning rods in a windy location.

It must have been so fun to be Benjamin Franklin. He installed an electric bell in-line on his first lightning rods so that this increase in electrical potential would cause the bell to ring, signaling that the danger for lightning was increased.

You can experience this voltage potential firsthand: take a friend to a hill or somewhere where high‑voltage power lines are nearer to the ground. One person, wearing rubber-soled shoes, stands tall with an arm in the air. The other squats down with both hands on the ground. The standing person uses the non-raised hand to gently touch the sensitive skin of the other person (ear lobe, lips), and they can feel an electric arc.

If that new theory turns out to be somewhat right, there'll be something humbling about ancient greeks stories of Zeus sending Hephaestus bolts from ~'heaven/the cosmos' being closer to it than our modern explanations all along

There's a Feynman lecture abput electricity in the atmosphere that is interesting to read alongside this article:

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html

I found this article interesting but lacking. Lightning also sometimes travels from the ground up to the clouds. Storm clouds produce red sprites (there are some theories about these) and blue jets, that shoot upwards towards space. Then there's ball lightning. None of these phenomena were discussed in the article.

I don't think scientists fully understand lightning at all. (At least, I don't!)

The earth is a massive battery, and it loves to exchange electricity with us when we touch it. I think people forget this, and I guess since we have grown up with rubber shows and are of generations that wear shoes even at home, we disconnect ourselves from these free electrons.

They are free, and help reduce inflammation and stuff - they are like free antioxidants.

Probably the same thing that causes my fingers to get a small spark when I'm walking in the grocery store holding a cart and touching the shelves.

I sometimes get a spark when petting my cat

Get a humidifier, the air is too dry.

Tl;dr lightings may be caused by electrons/positrons from outer space hitting a cloud and initiating an "avalanche" of electrons.

Cosmic rays are mostly protons, not electrons or positrons. You're mixing up to separate theories in the article.

Well, the primary particles that hit the atmosphere are mostly protons. They cause avalanche of secondaires that are varied but mostly muons,

As others have mentioned you are correct. But Earth's atmosphere has plenty of all forms of matter. A proton can interact with mostly anything and accelerate it. So you can find high energy everything in low earth orbit.

Much of the time they occur when two weather fronts of different temperatures collide with each other.

There’s a video of an EF5 tornado from the last 24-48 hours that shows continuous lightning in the background.

There hasn’t been an increase in background cosmic rays, so likely the mechanism for lightning generation is likely a continuum in different scenarios. Cosmic rays are one, but not all.

I tried to find this after reading your comment and the amount of nonsense AI tornado videos is a lot to wade through. Wasn't able to find it.

This was it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1t7jlat/a...

Despite the title, the video shows a really strong mesocyclone as there is a break between the cloud and the ground. The funnel might be visible, but it’s not as big as the video makes you think.

This video was a repost btw, it's from 2025:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Enderlin_tornado#Tornado_...

Orrrrrr, there are always tons of cosmic rays of the type that create lightning hitting earth, there just aren't the conditions necessary for those rays to trigger lightning except for when there's a big storm. I imagine the clouds are a different electrical environment than a regular sky and maybe in those conditions a cosmic rays will trigger lightning. Like a gigantic bubble chamber made of our atmosphere.

Volcanic eruptions are also known to have lightning in the eruption plume.

So, nothing new?

The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now.

This magazine…

> So, nothing new?

> The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now.

> This magazine…

I think saying "This magazine…" as if the flaws of Quanta are well understood and agreed may need additional elaboration. If you mean that experts have known this—well, the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself.

Well, let's say I just don't understand the popularity of this magazine on HN.

Why not explain why you think that? We can't all be perpetually online to have an opinion about a one website that shows up occasionally on this site.

Not the guy you’re responding to but Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.

> the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself

Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing whether they simultaneously are pretentious and over complicate things while also belabouring simple, elementary concepts. Essentially it’s the worst of every world.

And that’s to say nothing about how they click bait everything.

emdash means LLM written article

Here's an em-dash in an article from 2013.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/biology-confronts-data-comple...

The presence of an em-dash is not a smoking gun.

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