The main mystery in the study of ball lightning is their longevity and extremely unpredictable moments of appearance. Alexander Kostinsky, Deputy Director of MIEM HSE, whose laboratory is engaged in research and modeling of the development of lightning, told Naked Science about this.

According to the expert, at present, science knows several thousand reliable evidence of the existence of ball lightning.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, we collected thousands of evidence of the appearance of ball lightning. In the States, scientists also collected. That is, now there is reliable evidence - several tens of thousands exist that there is ball lightning, - the expert noted. - This is the first. Second: most of the cases of its observation are after ordinary lightning or are somehow connected with it. She, of course, does not curl up into a ball. But this is most likely a plasma phenomenon. People who got in contact with it received burns - not like from real lightning, it almost always kills, but something like from a strong electric shock.

According to Kostinsky, the main problem of the phenomenon is not the form of lightning, but the way it is fed with energy. “The problem of ball lightning is not in its form, but in what makes it live for so long. If we are talking about studies of ordinary lightning, then their life is very short (tenths and hundredths of a second). We know that lightning is a huge current, but they are also short-lived compared to ball lightning. Ball lightning lives for seconds and even tens of seconds. The main problem for scientists is to explain why she lives so long,” he said.

According to Kostinsky, there are currently a “huge” number of different hypotheses explaining the phenomenon, including “electrical” and “chemical” ones.

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