On one of those Discovery Channel specials about lightning, they mentioned that the temperature of lightning is “3 times the temperature of the Sun”. WTF?
Wouldn’t that be like several million degrees? If it is, how can anyone survive without dying of the shock of a burn at that temperature ?
Anyone know ?
Actually lightning is more like 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The sun, however, isn’t quite as hot on the surface as you might expect (around 10,000[sup]o[/sup]F). Lightning reaches over 50,000[sup]o[/sup]F. CITE
Lightning does burn things it hits and I think it is the superheated air from the lightning that causes thunder (instant air expansion = pressure wave = thunder…basically).
Thanks Dude !
I think the OP asks why one isn’t instantly turned to ash when stricken by a bolt of up to 50,000 degrees. Could you get a good tan? Maybe re-cook the food in your stomach. Gotta be bettter than those magnet-bracelet pieces of shite.
Yeah - I thought that somepeople died of shock when boiling water hit them in the face etc. What’s up with not dying when you get scorched at 50,000c ??
I don’t know a definitive answer to this but I imagine it is a combination of the following. Understand that lightning does burn things. Forest fires are frequently started by lightning, house burn down from lightning strikes and people are often burnt when struck. However lightning is one of those odd things where the results of being struck can vary greatly from instance to instance.
[ul]
[li] People often aren’t struck directly but instead are hit by ‘splash damage’. That is lightning will strike a nearby object (say a tree) and then jump from the object to the person. This almost certainly attenuates the power of the strike. Of course some people are hit directly so we need more than this.[/li]
[li] The actual duration of a lightning strike is very fast…on the order of a few milliseconds. That it burns anything at all in such a short duration is a testament to its high temperature.[/li]
[li] When hit by lightning the majority of the power travels over the outside of the body (called external flashover). Ever have a flammable liquid on your hand and set it on fire? For a short period you aren’t burnt as the fire burns off the surface liquid (DO NOT TRY THIS…great way to hurt yourself badly!). This also spreads the temperature over a greater area rather than at a single point. This external flahover is part of the reason that things like having your clothes blown off when hit by lightning happen (doesn’t always happen but it happens often enough to be in the literature on lightning strikes).[/li]
[li] As mentioned burns can and do occur…sometimes bad burns. In particular burns will occur at the entrance point and exit point on the body. External flashover can also burn but more often the flashover causes burns by heating other objects. Metal watches, coins, belt buckles and so on can get extremely hot and cause burns. The flashover will also heat wet areas so places where you sweat can cause problems (armpits for instance) as the sweat is turned into steam. It can also jump into orifices and deal with the moisture there so ear damage (rupture the tympanic membrane) in your nose and mouth and eye injuries (detached retina) are common.[/li]
[li] The power of the lightning stroke mostly is conducted through and around your body. As such the power mostly is not dissipated on you but rather to the ground the lightning is on its way to. As such you don’t actually absorb the full brint of the power of the lightning strike (if you did I imagine the result would be messy…at a gues I imagine you’d explode but I don’t know for certain).[/li]
[li] I have NO idea if this means anything but I saw it mentioned one place like it did (although no explanation was given). Maybe someone who does know can chime in on this one. Lightning is DC current compared to AC you have in your house and what most electrical accident occur with. How it might be ‘better’ to get zapped with DC current I couldn’t say (if it matters at all).[/li][/ul]
You get some interesting stories reading about htis stuff. In one case I read about a guy driving a boat who was hit by lightning. The guy had a metal prostheses in place of one of his arms and was using it to drive the boat. The lightning welded his arm to the steering wheel so clearly the heat and energy present are significant.
Here’s a few more tidbits. People often consider getting struck by lightning as an exceedingly rare event but lightning kills more people each year than hurricanes, volcanoes, blizzards, and earthquakes combined (only flash floods surpass lightning as a killer from mother nature). Considering the earth gets struck 8 million times a day (100 times per second) I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that it happens as often as it does.
Males account for over 80% of humans struck by lightning. When I saw this statistic being discussed the researchers expressed surprise but had no official answer as to why this is. They speculated that women are just smart enough to get out of bad weather while guys stand around watching the cool lightning show but they really don’t know.
If you really want to see lightning Florida is by far the best place in the US for it with more than twice as many strikes in a given timeframe than any other state.
It’s a common misconception, but heat and temperature are two different things. Lightning has a very high temperature, but owing largely to the low density of air, it doesn’t have all that much heat. If you took an iron rod the size of a lightning bolt, heated it up to ten thousand degrees, and touched a person with it… Well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t want to be the test subject, there. But take air that’s heated to that temperature, and there will be a lot less heat in it, so it’ll do less damage.
Another tidbit about temperature: For an object which is a blackbody (a fair approximation in most cases), the color it’ll appear when heated depends only on the temperature. If you look at a red star, and heat up your stove burner until it’s the same shade of red, then your stove burner and the surface of that star are at the same temperature. Get out your propane or MAP gas torch and heat a piece of metal to white-hot or blue-hot, and it’s the same temperature as anything else that’s white-hot or blue-hot (which is considerably hotter than the yellow-hot of the Sun).