A rare "red elf" spectacle appeared in the sky of Guiyang. What is a red luminous body?

Looking at the photo, you may think that this is a scene from a science fiction movie, but it is actually not a wonderful scene taken by a photographer in Genting Grassland on the high slope of Huaxi, Guizhou. Today, let's talk about how this kind of thing came into being and why.

Red elf is a kind of high-altitude atmospheric discharge phenomenon accompanied by thunderstorm, which usually occurs at the top of thunderstorm cloud about 30 to 90 kilometers from the ground. If there is no intuitive phenomenon about this distance, we can understand it by comparing the flying height of ordinary civil airliners. The flying height of an ordinary civil airliner is 10 km. And this 30 to 90 kilometers, even reached the edge of the earth's space. The upper part of the red elf is red, and the bottom gradually turns blue. The width is about five to ten kilometers, the duration is about ten to one hundred milliseconds, and it is as fleeting as lightning. Because these luminous bodies are red and appear in the air for less than one thirtieth of a second, they are as elusive as ghosts, so scientists call them? Red elf? (elves)

Although it is a discharge phenomenon, don't think it is lightning. It's cold plasma, more like the discharge phenomenon of fluorescent lamp. Because the discharge time of lightning is very short, so is the time of red elf lightning, and because it usually appears above the lightning cloud and only appears at night, it is not easy to be seen. People who don't know thought they saw the red ghost at first sight, so this kind of lightning was dubbed? Red ghost? Or? Red elf? Name, but someone calls it according to its shape? Red jellyfish? Lightning.

In the animated film Son of the Weather, when the hero goes to the sky to meet the heroine, the red elf also appears in the high-altitude background. In a word, this mysterious natural phenomenon is very wonderful and spectacular, and because of its short discharge time, it can be said that it adds a bit of fog to this phenomenon.