What is more powerful than a lightning bolt?

Superbolts make up less than 1% of total lightning, but when they do strike, they pack a powerful punch. While the average lightning strike contains around 300 million volts, superbolts are 1,000 times stronger and can cause major damage to infrastructure and ships, the authors say.
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What is the most powerful form of lightning?

The term “superbolt” was coined in a seminal study published in 1977 for flashes that pierced the sky with 1,000 times more light and energy than that. While these bolts make up only a tiny fraction of all lightning strikes, their extreme nature can help scientists probe the workings of electrical storms.
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What is the stronger version of lightning?

Every second, up to 100 lightning discharges occur around the world. But superbolts are much stronger and rarer, making up about one thousandth of 1 percent of all lightning strikes. The phenomenon was first recorded in 1977 by a group of satellites tasked with detecting nuclear explosions.
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What is the rarest lightning bolt?

Upward-moving lightning bolts like these are known as gigantic jets. They are the rarest and most powerful type of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and packing more than 50 times the power of a typical lightning bolt.
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What is super lightning?

It's an atmospheric electrical phenomenon that discharges 1,000 times more energy than the typical lightning bolt. This supercharged version of lightning, called “superbolts,” are relatively poorly understood by scientists, at present.
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The Science of Lightning | National Geographic

Is Dark lightning a real thing?

First reported in 1994, dark lightning is estimated to flash around the world about a thousand times each day. But scientists have only a hazy understanding of how it initiates. They generally agree dark lightning is sparked by the electric fields generated by thunderstorms and lightning bolts.
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What are 5 types of lightning?

Cloud to...
  • Cloud-to-ground flash [+] Cloud-to-ground flash.
  • Intra-cloud lightning [+] Intra-cloud lightning.
  • Cloud-to-air flash [+] Cloud-to-air flash.
  • Spider lightning [+] Spider lightning.
  • Red sprite, photographed from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/JSC [+]
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What is faster than a lightning bolt?

Originally Answered: What travels faster than lightning? Lightning strokes propagate about 100,000 km/sec, or about 1/3 the speed of light. So there's not a whole lot that is faster, other than light and radio waves.
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Is Black lightning rare?

However, there is approximately only one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes, and since pilots do their utmost to avoid thunderstorms, the risk of injury is quite limited. It remains unclear whether anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.
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Is pink lightning rare?

In snowstorms, where it is somewhat rare, pink and green are often described as colors of lightning. Haze, dust, moisture, raindrops and any other particles in the atmosphere will affect the color by absorbing or diffracting a portion of the white light of lightning.
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What color is the hottest lightning?

The color of the bolt depends on how hot it is; the hotter the lightning, the closer the color will be to the end of the spectrum. The color spectrum in this case start with infared which is red and the coolest up to ultraviolet which appears violet and is the hottest.
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Is Purple lightning rare?

The colors of lightning are caused by the reflection of light off the dust particles n the air. The most common color is purple.
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Is lightning more powerful than lava?

Lightning is hot. Really hot. It can reach temperatures as high as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface of the sun, and even hotter than lava here on Earth.
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What is Spider lightning?

These flashes are called spider lightning due to the pattern they create when they quickly creep and crawl from one cloud to another. These long, horizontally traveling flashes can be seen from Earth below the clouds when they are especially strong and bright.
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Is lightning better than fire?

Both lightning and fire are powerful natural phenomena that can cause significant damage and destruction. However, in terms of raw power, lightning is generally considered more powerful than fire.
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Is Death by lightning rare?

Interestingly enough, most people survive. If you are struck by lightning the chance of it being fatal is only 1 in 10, a 90% survival rate.
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What happens if dark lightning hits you?

Dark lightning happens at cruising altitude for some planes. If a plane should pass near a bolt of dark lightning, said Pallu, its passengers could receive 0.3 sieverts of radiation in an instant. That's more than a year's worth of radiation exposure.
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Can Black Lightning beat storm?

This would be a close match, but Black Lightning would ultimately win. His powers are more formidable, and the way he manipulates them would put him a step ahead of Storm.
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Is light 3x faster than lightning?

The average speed of lightning is not as fast as the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second. In fact, the velocity of lightning travels at approximately one-third the velocity of light, i.e., 99,930,819 meters per second. So, no lightning is not faster than the speed of light.
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How hot is lightning?

In fact, lightning can heat the air it passes through to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5 times hotter than the surface of the sun). When lightning strikes a tree, the heat vaporizes any water in its path possibly causing the tree to explode or a strip of bark to be blown off.
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Is lightning a plasma or electricity?

Additionally, the lightning seen in thunderstorms is another form of plasma. Lightning is caused by electricity traveling through the air and ionizing the areas it travels through, creating a great conductor path.
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How rare is dry lightning?

Dry lightning has ignited some of the most destructive and costly wildfires in California history, a new study shows. Researchers found that over the past few decades, nearly half of the lightning strikes that hit the ground during spring and summer had been dry — there was no rain falling nearby.
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What is red lightning?

Sprites appear as luminous red-orange flashes. They often occur in clusters above the troposphere at an altitude range of 50–90 km (31–56 mi). Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886.
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Does lightning smell like sulfur?

Sheet and heat lightning are common types of intra-cloud lightning. Ball lightning is a bluish-white or yellow electrified sphere that floats in the air or along the ground. It usually lasts between five to 10 seconds and often has a burning smell of sulfur along the way.
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