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Not a UFO: Chinese scientists capture ball lightning for the first time

(People's Daily Online)    09:45, February 01, 2014
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No, that glowing orb isn't a UFO. It is a flash of ball lightning. People all over the world have reported seeing ball lightning during storms, yet no one seems to have managed to film it, let alone capture a close-up of it until now.

Ball lightning has been one of the most mysterious natural phenomena for centuries, partly because it is rare and transient and therefore hard to capture and investigate. But in 2012, a group of Chinese scientists managed, by accident, to not only observe but also record it during a field experiment to study ordinary lightning in Qinghai, western China.

According to a researcher, the ball of light traveled 15 meters in the air before disappearing. The diameter of the lightning ball was about 5 meters and the lightning only lasted for less than two seconds.

Details about the ball lightning were published on Physical Review Letters on Jan 17, 2014. Video clips and spectrographs of the 2012 storm are believed to be the first scientific recordings of ball lightning in nature.

(Editor:GaoYinan、Yao Chun)

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