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Blobrana


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Sprites
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Rare 'sprites' photographed beside Southern Lights

An Australian photographer has captured images of rare sprites, a meteor shower and the Southern Lights - all in a single night.
Sprites - flashes of electricity - can reach the Earth's upper atmosphere, often displaying as a brilliant light.
He took photos of the "space lightning" at Kiama, 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney.
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Blobrana


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Giant Red Sprite Seen From Space Station



Orbiting above a storm recently, International Space Station astronauts captured a rarely seen type of sky show on camera: a fleeting electrical burst called a red sprite.
And not just any sprite.
The red sprite's exceptional size (in a word, giant), plus the resolution and sense of scale in the picture - distributed by NASA this week - have experts intrigued, despite the fact that red sprites have been seen from space before.
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Blobrana


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Lightning Sprites
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Lightning Sprites Are Out-of-This-World
 
Only a few decades ago, scientists discovered the existence of "sprites" 30 to 55 miles above the surface of the Earth. They're offshoots of electric discharges caused by lightning storms, and a valuable window into the composition of our atmosphere. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University say that sprites are not a phenomenon specific to our planet.
Jupiter and Saturn experience lightning storms with flashes 1,000 or more times more powerful than those on Earth, says Ph.D. student Daria Dubrovin. With her supervisors Prof. Colin Price of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences and Prof. Yoav Yair of the Open University of Israel, and collaborators Prof. Ute Ebert and Dr. Sander Nijdam from the Eindhoven Technical University in Holland, Dubrovin has re-created these planetary atmospheres in the lab to study the presence of sprites in space.
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Blobrana


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Lightning Creates Particle Accelerators Above Earth

Scientists have speculated since 1925 that thunderstorms might create such natural particle accelerators. But until now, no one had managed to detect them.

"The beam of particles is very narrow, and the likelihood of a satellite being in the right place at the right time to spot such a thing is very slim" -  Martin Füllekrug, a lightning researcher from the University of Bath in the U.K.

Instead, Füllekrug and colleagues used ground-based instruments in thunderstorm-prone southern France to look for transient airglows, or sprites. These fast-moving bursts of light have been linked to strong lightning bolts.
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Blobrana


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Giant Natural Particle Accelerator Above Thunderclouds

A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth. On Wednesday 14th April Dr. Martin Fullekrug will present his new work at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow.
When particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds.
The cosmic rays strip off electrons from air molecules and these electrons are accelerated upwards by the electric field of the lightning discharge. The free electrons and the lightning electric field then make up a natural particle accelerator.

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