What causes cyan lightning?

Nitrogen, the dominant gas in the atmosphere, is excited by this strong flow of energy, its electrons moving to higher energy states. The distinctive blue-white color of lightning is caused by light emitted as the electrons drop back to their original energy states.

What is the rarest color of lightning?

Green lightning is a rare phenomenon that can be seen during a thunderstorm. Someone who has seen green lightning is extremely lucky as green lightning strikes are rarely seen. It is so rare that the only photograph of a green lightning strike is one from when the Chaiten volcano in Chile erupted.

Can lightning be cyan?

Lightning comes in every color of the rainbow (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Violet, to name a few). It's almost always white, but often it's tinged with another color around the edges.

What causes turquoise lightning?

Green/turquoise flashes and/or changing colors: A flash of light in the sky that lingers, pulses and/or changes colors is not lightning, but electrical arcing from shorted-out power lines.

What causes blue green lightning?

Green lighting indicates that a tornado might be on its way. This phenomena occurs later in the day when the sun gets closer to the horizon. While the sky may appear reddish during the sunset, the sky is mainly blue. When a blue object is illuminated with red light, it appears to be green.

The Science of Lightning | National Geographic

What is pink lightning?

. Perhaps the strangest colors reported are instances of pink or green lightning seen during snowstorms. The phenomenon, known as”thundersnow”, is rare. The unique sky color is caused as snowflakes refract and reflect the white bolt in a unique way.

How hot is purple lightning?

How Hot Is Purple Lightning? Purple lightning is often seen during thunderstorms and it's one of the more moderate forms of lightning with temperatures reaching up to 55,000 degrees Fahrenheit!

What is green lightning?

Although green lightning seems unusual, Few now suspects it occurs during all thunderstorms but is concealed inside clouds. Secret Origins. The concealment results from the structure of storm clouds. On the inside, the clouds contain ice crystals that are either positively or negatively charged.

What is dark lightning?

Dark lightning is a burst of gamma rays produced during thunderstorms by extremely fast moving electrons colliding with air molecules. Researchers refer to such a burst as a terrestrial gamma ray flash.

Is there Black lightning?

Scientists have just begun to understand a strange phenomenon known simply as "dark lightning". Different from regular lightning, dark lightning is a release of high-energy gamma radiation—sources include supernovae and supermassive black holes—that is completely invisible to the human eye.

Is blue lightning rare?

These colorful flashes are called blue jets and they can stretch 30 miles into the stratosphere. Blue jets can only be seen from the ground under rare circumstances because they're brief and are typically obscured by clouds.

Is purple lightning rare?

The rare purple lightning strike occurs far higher in the atmosphere than normal lightning – and has only rarely been caught on film. The flash of 'ionospheric lightning' stands out against the deep blue of a night sky behind, while the raging storm lights up the clouds below.

Is red lightning possible?

Red lightning doesn't exist in the literal sense, according to the National Weather Service. The closest known phenomena is something called a red sprite, which occurs high in the atmosphere “directly above an active thunderstorm,” NOAA says.

What color is savitar's lightning?

Also, the armor is capable of changing the color of a speedster's lightning as the armor changed Savitar's lightning from yellow to white.

Is Gold lightning real?

Yellow lightning is uncommon; however, they tend to be cooler than the blue, lilac and white. They're caused to due to a high concentration of dust in the air. And is an indication of a dry thunderstorm with low-precipitation.

What is the strongest lightning?

What is Globe lightning?

Instances of ball lightning—glowing, electric orbs in the sky—have captivated and mystified us for centuries. The bizarre phenomenon, also known as globe lightning, usually appears during thunderstorms as a floating sphere that can range in color from blue to orange to yellow, disappearing within a few seconds.

Is there invisible lightning?

But scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of unexpectedly powerful radiation. It's what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark lightning.

Are there different colors of lightning?

This brought up a question, "Why are lightning strikes different colors?" This oftentimes has to do with how far away or close you are to the lightning strike. When lightning strikes, different particles will scatter this light and cause the strike to appear as blue, pink, purple, white or even a brown-ish tint.

Is rainbow lightning real?

Rainbow lightning is a rare as the chances of lightning striking near a rainbow are slim, explained Randall Cerveny, a professor of meteorology at Arizona State University in Tempe. 'Usually, you don't get those two things to line up at the same time,' he said in a 2015 Live Science piece.

How hot is white lightning?

This flow of electrons through the lightning bolt creates a very hot plasma, as hot as 50,000 degrees, that emits a spectrum of electromagnetic energy. Some of this radiation is in the form of radio waves and gamma rays.

What is hotter lightning or lava?

Lightning is much hotter than lava. Lightning is 70,000 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to Lava at 2,240 degrees.

How hot is blue fire?

Blue flames usually appear at a temperature between 2,600º F and 3,000º F. Blue flames have more oxygen and get hotter because gases burn hotter than organic materials, such as wood. When natural gas is ignited in a stove burner, the gases quickly burn at a very high temperature, yielding mainly blue flames.

Is anything hotter than lightning?

A bolt of lightning is 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. One thing hotter is when gold atoms are smashed together by the Large Hadron Collider, but only for a split second. Another thing hotter is a supernova.