alt.hn

5/6/2026 at 3:41:06 PM

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

 https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-lightning-the-answer-keeps-getting-more-interesting-20260506/

by Tomte

5/9/2026 at 7:44:16 AM

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)?

by nomilk

5/9/2026 at 2:02:59 PM

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

by innis226

5/9/2026 at 7:47:08 AM

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

by deepandmeaning

5/9/2026 at 5:07:27 PM

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

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

by CGMthrowaway

5/9/2026 at 5:30:12 PM

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

by kjkjadksj

5/9/2026 at 8:04:40 PM

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

by margalabargala

5/11/2026 at 10:42:49 AM

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.

by j_seigh

5/11/2026 at 3:48:26 PM

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.

by quinncom

5/9/2026 at 8:38:18 AM

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

by teh_infallible

5/9/2026 at 10:25:33 AM

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

by batch12

5/9/2026 at 10:24:53 AM

Maybe just salt water and skip the filings?

by CamelCaseCondo

5/9/2026 at 5:06:07 PM

Even better, use hydrogen!

by CamperBob2

5/11/2026 at 8:24:25 PM

Hydrogen string is notoriously hard to tie knots in.

by IAmBroom

5/9/2026 at 11:03:01 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

5/9/2026 at 1:59:40 PM

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

by raulparada

5/9/2026 at 7:43:17 PM

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!)

by wpollock

5/9/2026 at 5:30:24 PM

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.

by saltyoldman

5/9/2026 at 9:35:01 PM

I sometimes get a spark when petting my cat

by varispeed

5/10/2026 at 8:02:10 PM

Get a humidifier, the air is too dry.

by fragmede

5/11/2026 at 10:33:13 PM

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.

by mannanj

5/9/2026 at 9:45:59 AM

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

by freehorse

5/9/2026 at 1:16:35 PM

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.

by xattt

5/9/2026 at 3:41:04 PM

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.

by aaarrm

5/10/2026 at 1:32:07 PM

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

by themaninthedark

5/10/2026 at 4:35:09 AM

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.

by ambicapter

5/9/2026 at 10:27:41 AM

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

by pfdietz

5/9/2026 at 12:17:02 PM

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

by nirse

5/9/2026 at 3:11:44 PM

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.

by sidewndr46

5/9/2026 at 11:30:56 AM

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

by nephihaha

5/9/2026 at 7:19:42 AM

[flagged]

by cinderelacinder

5/9/2026 at 8:21:02 AM

[flagged]

by metalman

5/9/2026 at 2:35:29 PM

Neutrons, neutrinos, photons, Z bosons and Higgs bosons are all neutral particles and carry no charge.

by cratermoon

5/9/2026 at 3:49:14 PM

no detectable ELECTRICAL charge, but they do contain "energy", and do attract with other particles, so I am still ABSOLUTLY totaly correct in my statement. "the universe is an energy gradient", and one of the few absolutes

by metalman

5/9/2026 at 5:33:46 PM

[flagged]

by avazhi

5/9/2026 at 6:43:24 PM

Explain exactly what's click bait about it? Spell it out like I'm an idiot who found the article quite good for a fairly wide audience.

by chermi

5/10/2026 at 4:53:53 AM

Sure.

Look at the title. Imagine what you'd expect an article whose title is "What causes lightning?" to say.

Now, here's how the article closes:

"These features suggest that even as explanations get more comprehensive, the case of how lightning really works will keep getting reopened. “It just gets more and more bizarre the more we look,” Dwyer said. “Clearly our very simple pictures here are really incomplete.”

So TLDR, we don't know, we know we don't know, and in fact we anticipate not knowing for quite some time. The article explicitly admits it doesn't know the answer to the question it posed in the title - no, the answer doesn't keep getting more interesting, because we don't have the answer yet.

That's clickbait.

by avazhi

5/11/2026 at 5:09:13 PM

No. The title has a question mark. And the premise that many people think lightning is a dielectric breakdown from high voltage is accurate (if not those words). Posing it as a question is completely valid because it still is an open question.

by chermi

5/9/2026 at 7:24:27 PM

Is that the purpose of Quanta? To provide new info, new info to who? To you, specifically?

Its purpose: https://www.quantamagazine.org/about/

by dezsiszabi

5/10/2026 at 4:48:22 AM

Quanta articles are invariably horribly written, horribly explained, and constantly do this thing where 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.

by avazhi

5/9/2026 at 11:14:46 AM

[flagged]

by joshikarthikey

5/9/2026 at 2:15:49 PM

We don’t even understand friction. Which is one source of static charges, which we thus don’t understand well either. And static charges that somehow accumulate in the clouds cause lightning, which… I think you get the point.

by Sharlin

5/9/2026 at 12:07:16 PM

It is cool that something so seemingly ordinary is extraordinary.

by dnnddidiej

5/9/2026 at 11:48:39 AM

Not to be flip, but, depending on what "fully" means, we haven't fully understood much of anything about the real world.

by JadeNB

5/9/2026 at 11:29:52 AM

Never mind this kind of lightning, it gets really interesting when we start to look at ball lightning, which is very real but rarely sighted.

by nephihaha

5/9/2026 at 11:52:27 AM

As a child I saw an acted segment about ball lightning in childrens‘ TV, following a person around the house, and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. The thing is spooky as hell.

by Tomte

5/9/2026 at 3:14:33 PM

As long as you reject the hypothesis of "ionized matter" ball lightning is completely unexplainable. If you accept that ionized matter is hot and gives off plenty of EM radiation, it's pretty simple.

by sidewndr46

5/9/2026 at 12:45:56 PM

We don't even have an accurate mathematical description of how a single water molecule works.

We have so much scientific work to do.

by echelon

5/9/2026 at 9:56:27 AM

So, nothing new?

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

This magazine…

by fguerraz

5/9/2026 at 11:47:41 AM

> 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.

by JadeNB

5/10/2026 at 12:28:11 AM

> 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.

by avazhi

5/9/2026 at 1:18:31 PM

[dead]

by paxcoder

5/9/2026 at 4:06:39 PM

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

by fguerraz

5/9/2026 at 5:38:50 PM

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.

by kami23

5/10/2026 at 12:26:52 AM

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.

by avazhi