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Dark lightning appears sometimes to compete with normal lightning as a way for thunderstorms to vent the electrical energy that gets pent up inside their roiling interiors, Dwyer says. Unlike with regular lightning, though, people struck by dark lightning, most likely while flying in an airplane, would not get hurt. But according to Dwyer’s calculations, they might receive in an instant the maximum safe lifetime dose of ionizing radiation — the kind that wreaks the most havoc on the human body. The only way to determine whether an airplane had been struck by dark lightning, Dwyer says, “would be to use a radiation detector. Right in the middle of [a flash], a very brief bluish-purple glow around the plane might be perceptible. Inside an aircraft, a passenger would probably not be able to feel or hear much of anything, but the radiation dose could be significant.”
very brief bluish-purple glow around the plane
Originally posted by kdog1982
This is what caught my eye..
very brief bluish-purple glow around the plane
What do you think?
Peace,
K
Dark Lightning.—When a photographic plate is exposed to a succession of lightning flashes it occasionally happens that one or more of the earlier streak images, on development, exhibits the "Clayden effect"—that is, appears completely reversed— while the others show no such tendency. Obviously, then, on prints from such a negative the reversed streaks must appear as dark lines (Fig. 120), and for that reason the lightning flashes that produced them have been called " dark lightning." There is, of course, no such thing as dark lightning, since the only invisible radiation to which the ordinary photographic plate is sensitive is the ultra-violet, which cannot be excited by electric discharges in the atmosphere without at the same time producing visible radiation. Nevertheless, the photographic phenomenon that gives rise to the name " dark lightning," is real, interesting, and reproducible at will in the laboratory.106
Nature 60, 391 (24 August 1899) | doi:10.1038/060391a0;
Apparent Dark Lightning Flashes
WILLIAM J. S. LOCKYER
Abstract
During the exposures I was observing the sky, and repeatedly found that after nearly each bright flash I could see distinctly a. reversed image of each flash in any part of the sky to which?
This matter of NBEs behaving as “dark lightning” (rel- ative to other lightning) is sufficiently contentious, as well as sufficiently puzzling, that we return to the data of Fig. 1 and examine in detail the tight-coincidence events classified by LASA as NBEs.
Regarding dark lightening, I don't understand how the energy discharge doesn't release photons and the source seems flimsy.
According to their model, instead of creating normal lightning, thunderstorms can sometimes produce an exotic kind of electrical breakdown that involves high-energy electrons and their anti-matter equivalent called positrons. The interplay between the electrons and positrons causes an explosive growth in the number of these high-energy particles, emitting the observed flash of gamma-rays while rapidly discharging the thundercloud, sometimes even faster than normal lightning. Even though copious gamma-rays are emitted by this process, very little visible light is produced, creating a kind of electrical breakdown within the storms called “dark lightning.”
...
This fundamental research is funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's NIMBUS program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
This led to the suspicion that the strongest impulsive VHF events may be a distinct class of discharge, which produces little or no optical emission. This new finding of “dark lightning” has yet to be explained. We do no yet know whether there truly is no optical emission at all from NBEs or if it is just a detection/sensitivity issue. All we know presently is that the optical emission is below the detection threshold of current instruments. Unpublished data have shown agreement with the “dark lightning” finding, in that photodiodes fielded alongside ground-based VLF/LF sensors typically show no optical light curves de- tected from corresponding VLF/LF NBE detections. Therefore, the upper limit to radiated power of any NBE-optical-emission appears to be low.