Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
Easy! Don't try this at home! Get a charged car battery and some 'wire wool', spray the wire wool with a small amount if silicone oil. drop some of the wool on the battery terminals, voila ball lightning, lasts for a second or so. You need to experiment on the amounts of wool to use. As I said though don't try this it's dangerous, I know I did it when I was a kid!!! Mark -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob McCafferty Sent: 12 January 2007 02:05 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab Is this really new stuff? I watched Bolas Luminosas and they looked almost identical to something I saw years ago on some BBC documentary about lightning. Some Scientist used a couple of hundred Decomissioned submarine batteries to generate sparks and got the same effect. I remember showing the video to kids I taught 7-8 years ago. Rob McC --- Martin Altmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They look like the ideal pets for Dave Harris in the video -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Ron Baalke Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. Januar 2007 18:50 An: Meteorite Mailing List Betreff: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500 Lightning balls created in the lab Hazel Muir New Scientist 10 January 2007 Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here. http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing. One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang. A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a team led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. The luminous balls seem to be alive, says Pavao. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans. These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off. The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves, says Pavao, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. It made my year when I heard about it, he says. The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning. Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds. From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 10 January 2007, page 12 __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com
Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
Hi List! I remember that you can have a lot of fun with wire wool and a microwave oven. Also a nice lightning ball! But don't forget to throw the microwave away later; it won't be useful any more after that treatment. ;) Ingo -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von mark ford Gesendet: Freitag, 12. Januar 2007 12:47 An: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab Easy! Don't try this at home! Get a charged car battery and some 'wire wool', spray the wire wool with a small amount if silicone oil. drop some of the wool on the battery terminals, voila ball lightning, lasts for a second or so. You need to experiment on the amounts of wool to use. As I said though don't try this it's dangerous, I know I did it when I was a kid!!! Mark -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob McCafferty Sent: 12 January 2007 02:05 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab Is this really new stuff? I watched Bolas Luminosas and they looked almost identical to something I saw years ago on some BBC documentary about lightning. Some Scientist used a couple of hundred Decomissioned submarine batteries to generate sparks and got the same effect. I remember showing the video to kids I taught 7-8 years ago. Rob McC --- Martin Altmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They look like the ideal pets for Dave Harris in the video -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Ron Baalke Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. Januar 2007 18:50 An: Meteorite Mailing List Betreff: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500 Lightning balls created in the lab Hazel Muir New Scientist 10 January 2007 Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here. http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing. One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang. A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a team led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. The luminous balls seem to be alive, says Pavao. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans. These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off. The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves, says Pavao, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. It made my year when I heard about it, he says. The balls, although still small
Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:28:53 +0100, you wrote: Hi List! I remember that you can have a lot of fun with wire wool and a microwave oven. Also a nice lightning ball! But don't forget to throw the microwave away later; it won't be useful any more after that treatment. ;) I posted these links to the list, but they seemed to have never made it: http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/cwillis/microwave.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~reginald/ball_l.html http://apache.airnet.com.au/~fastinfo/microwave/ball.html http://amasci.com/weird/microwave/voltage2.html __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
[meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500 Lightning balls created in the lab Hazel Muir New Scientist 10 January 2007 Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here. http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing. One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang. A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a team led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. The luminous balls seem to be alive, says Pavao. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans. These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off. The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves, says Pavao, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. It made my year when I heard about it, he says. The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning. Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds. From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 10 January 2007, page 12 __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
They look like the ideal pets for Dave Harris in the video -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Ron Baalke Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. Januar 2007 18:50 An: Meteorite Mailing List Betreff: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500 Lightning balls created in the lab Hazel Muir New Scientist 10 January 2007 Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here. http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing. One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang. A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a team led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. The luminous balls seem to be alive, says Pavao. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans. These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off. The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves, says Pavao, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. It made my year when I heard about it, he says. The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning. Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds. From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 10 January 2007, page 12 __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab
Is this really new stuff? I watched Bolas Luminosas and they looked almost identical to something I saw years ago on some BBC documentary about lightning. Some Scientist used a couple of hundred Decomissioned submarine batteries to generate sparks and got the same effect. I remember showing the video to kids I taught 7-8 years ago. Rob McC --- Martin Altmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They look like the ideal pets for Dave Harris in the video -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Im Auftrag von Ron Baalke Gesendet: Donnerstag, 11. Januar 2007 18:50 An: Meteorite Mailing List Betreff: [meteorite-list] Lightning Balls Created In The Lab http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19325863.500 Lightning balls created in the lab Hazel Muir New Scientist 10 January 2007 Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the boucing balls here. http://www.espacociencia.pe.gov.br/multimidia.php Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing. One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang. A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a team led by Antonio Pavao and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. The luminous balls seem to be alive, says Pavao. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavao's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans. These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off. The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves, says Pavao, whose findings will appear in Physical Review Letters. Abrahamson is thrilled. It made my year when I heard about it, he says. The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning. Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds. From issue 2586 of New Scientist magazine, 10 January 2007, page 12 __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
