August 29, 2007
Your birthday is not just a date on a calendar. It is the yearly return of a moment when the universe became more observant, more feeling,...
Gigantic Jets Over Oklahoma
Birthday · August 29, 2007
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APOD published August 29, 2007. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Have you ever seen a gigantic jet? They are extremely rare but tremendously powerful. Gigantic jets are a newly discovered type of lightning discharge between some thunderstorms and the Earth's ionosphere high above them. Pictured above is one such jet caught by accident by a meteor camera in Oklahoma, USA. The gigantic jet, at the lower left, traversed perhaps 70 kilometers in just under one second. Clicking on the image will bring up a movie in many browsers, also visible here. Gigantic jets are much different from regular cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning. The bottoms of gigantic jets appear similar in appearance to another type cloud-to-ionosphere strike called blue jets, while the tops appear similar to upper-atmosphere red sprites. Although the mechanism and trigger that causes gigantic jets is a topic of research, it is clear that the jets reduce charge imbalance between different parts of Earth's atmosphere. A good way to look for gigantic jets is to watch a powerful but distant thunderstorm from a clear location.