'Gigantic jet' that shot into space may be the most powerful lightning bolt ever detected - Space.com

But instead of striking down toward the ground, or zipping sideways between clouds, this lightning bolt does something unexpected: It blasts straight upward from the top of the cloud, shooting 50 miles (80 kilometers) into the sky, grazing the lower edge of space.

They are the rarest and most powerful sort of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and emitting more than 50 times as much energy as a typical lightning bolt — and now, scientists have just detected the single most powerful gigantic jet yet.

3 in the journal Science Advances (opens in new tab), researchers analyzed a gigantic jet that shot out of a cloud over Oklahoma in 2018.

By studying the jet's radio-wave (opens in new tab) emissions using satellite and radar data, the team learned that the bolt moved approximately 300 coulombs of energy from the top of the cloud to the lower ionosphere — the layer of charged particles that separates Earth's upper atmosphere from the vacuum of space — or roughly 60 times the 5-coulomb output of a typical lightning bolt.

Scientists analyzing the footage found that, as luck would have it, the jet occurred very near the center of a large lightning mapping array (LMA) — a network of ground-based radio antennas used to map the locations and times of lightning strikes.

The researchers found that the jet's highest-frequency radio-wave emissions (the kind that LMAs are built to detect) came from small structures called streamers, which develop at the very tip of a lightning bolt and create a "direct electrical connection between the cloud top and the lower ionosphere," lead study author Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, said in a statement (opens in new tab)?

This discrepancy is true of all lightning strikes, not just gigantic jets, the researchers wrote.

Scientists still aren't totally clear on that, but it likely involves some sort of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of a cloud; gigantic jets are typically observed in storms that don't produce many cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, the team added. .

—'Superbolts' are real, and they flash up to 1,000 times brighter than regular lightning (opens in new tab).

"In the absence of the lightning discharges we normally see, the gigantic jet may relieve the buildup of excess negative charge in the cloud.".

More research — and a lot more luck — is needed to understand these epic, upside-down lightning strikes.