Storyline:
Part I: Eyewitness Reports of the Unusual Phenomena: Ball Lightning
Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks.
It is in general described as a luminous sphere, most often the size of a small child's head. It appears usually during thunderstorms, sometimes within a few seconds of lightning but sometimes without apparent connection to a lightning bolt. Its lifetime varies widely, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes. The lifetime of ball lightning tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness.
The scientific community is increasingly convinced that ball lightning is a real phenomenon (although there remain some skeptics). What could cause ball lightning, on the other hand, is a source of steady controversy.
Part II: Chinese Researchers Measured a Spectrum of Light Emitted by the Rare and Elusive Ball Lightning
Ball lightning has been one of the most mysterious natural phenomena for centuries, partly because it is so rare and transient and therefore hard to investigate. But a fortuitous observation during field experiments in China to study ordinary lightning, reported in Physical Review Letters, has now provided what seems to be the first measurement of the emission spectrum of ball lightning. The data suggest that the glowing ball was composed of elements from soil, consistent with one popular theory.
One popular theory is that ball lightning is caused when lightning striking the ground vaporizes some of the silicate minerals in soil. Carbon in the soil strips the silicates of oxygen through chemical reactions, creating a gas of energetic silicon atoms. These then recombine to form nanoparticles or filaments, while still floating in air, react with oxygen, releasing heat and emitting the glow. If that’s so, one should expect to see atomic emission lines of silicon and other soil elements in the spectrum.
That is what Ping Yuan and co-workers from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, reported.
Part III: A New Hypothesis Proposed by a Chinese Scientist on the Origin of Ball Lightning
Sometimes, under certain conditions, a small and relatively spherical slice of the atmosphere which surrounds us, for a short while lights up.
These balls of fire are called wandering lights, St. Elmo's fire, Ghost lights or ball lightning. Even today we have no clear explanation of how they arise and what they do. But this does not mean that scientists have given up trying to figure it out.
In June 2016, the Chinese scholar Huichun Wu proposed a new, convincing explanation of this phenomenon by publishing an article in the journal Scientific Reports.
According to Wu, if the hypothesis is confirmed, his theory would ...
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Director & Host: Jie Wang
Jie Wang in Chinese sounds like "诘问", which means "cross-examine evidence to seek out truth".
Jie is a well-known popular science commentator and communicator in China.
Jie's hardworking and productive. His masterpiece The Shape of Time (Historical Story about Relativity) won the eighth annual Wenjin Award, China's national-level comprehensive book award to encourage public reading. His science fiction novel The Cage of Time won the eighteenth Hundred Flowers Awards for Literary, one of the most professional and authoritative awards on the Chinese mainland.
Jie's self-media radio station Science Has Stories was prized top 10 commercial technology anchors in 2018 and the most commercially valuable anchor in 2019 in Himalaya FM, a Chinese pioneer in live-streaming broadcasts, audiobooks and podcasts.
Jie also acts as the executive secretary of Voice of Science, a science media league to popularize scientific knowledge and disseminate scientific spirit. Voice of Science takes its mission to improve people's scientific literacy, advocate logic and empirical evidence, oppose pseudoscience, and eliminate ignorance and superstition.
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