For such a scene, netizens also sighed, it is really beautiful, just like the most romantic fireworks show in the universe. netizensPaulownia Dong ShuchangHe also said on Weibo that in the early morning of 520 in 2022, he recorded the fireworks blooming over the Himalayas – countless elf lightnings.
The red elf is a kind of elf lightning. The elf lightning is academically called “transient luminescence event”. This kind of phenomenon is a very rare atmospheric luminescence phenomenon that began to attract attention in the 1990s. The elf lightning phenomenon It is different from the ordinary lightning that people usually recognize, but it has a certain relationship with ordinary lightning.
“Most types of elf lightning are caused by strong lightning. If the lightning is particularly strong, elf lightning may appear in the sky at an altitude of tens of kilometers where the lightning occurs.” Usually, the duration of elf lightning does not exceed one time. 1 millisecond and even some elf lightning types last less than 0.1 milliseconds, which is one ten thousandth of a second.
There are certain similarities between elf lightning and aurora, both of which are particles in the atmosphere that are excited to radiate light. The aurora is caused by the solar wind that causes the solar storm to impact the earth’s magnetosphere, causing the high-speed movement of atmospheric particles to ionize and transition to emit light. The difference is that the elf lightning is a phenomenon in which a series of electromagnetic effects are transmitted to the high altitude due to the strong lightning in the thunderstorm cloud below, and then the lightning is triggered in the high altitude.
Reports of elves date back to before 1886, but it wasn’t until July 6, 1989, that scientists at the University of Minnesota took pictures of elves for the first time. So far people have taken tens of thousands of sprite photos or videos. Why didn’t everyone pay attention to the red elves until a hundred years later? It’s because this kind of red sprite is caused by the positive ground flash between the thunderstorm cloud and the ground below. It appears in about a few milliseconds and requires a high-speed camera to capture it.
The upper part of the red elf is orange-red, and the hanging tendrils look like giant red jellyfish, and this phenomenon usually occurs in groups, spanning the interval of 50 to 90 kilometers above sea level. In addition to the red sprites, photographers also reported jet stream phenomena in Tibet, which are also associated with strong storms.
