Lightning Sprites, Elves Caught on Camera
Mysterious energy bursts recorded high above U.S. Midwest.
First seen by scientists in 1989, sprites and their menagerie of exotically named kin are bursts of electrical energy that form about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, sometimes leaping all the way from the tops of thunderheads to outer space.
(Related: "Thunderstorms Shoot Antimatter Beams Into Space.")
Lightning sprites are huge but quick—they appear and are gone in only ten milliseconds, said Hans Stenbaek-Nielsen, a space physicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
The phenomena are also extremely bright.
"They're brighter than the planet Venus," as seen from Earth, Stenbaek-Nielsen said this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
In fact, he added, sprites are so bright that it's amazing nobody saw them until 20 years
