From time immemorial, mankind has tried to logically explain various electrical phenomena, examples of which they observed in nature. So, in ancient times, lightning was considered a sure sign of the wrath of the gods, medieval sailors blissfully trembled before the fires of St. Elmo, and our contemporaries are extremely afraid of meeting ball lightning.
All these are electrical phenomena. In nature, everything, even you and me, carries an electric charge. If objects with large charges of different polarity approach each other, then a physical interaction occurs, the visible result of which is a cold plasma flow between them colored, as a rule, in yellow or purple. Its flow stops as soon as the charges in both bodies are balanced.
The most common electrical phenomena in nature are lightning. Every second, several hundred of them hit the Earth's surface. Lightning usually chooses free-standing high objects as their target, because, according to physical laws, in order to transfer a strong chargethe shortest distance between the thundercloud and the Earth's surface is required. To protect buildings from lightning strikes, their owners install lightning rods on the roofs, which are high metal structures with grounding, which, when lightning strikes, allows them to divert the entire discharge into the soil.
St. Elmo's fire is another electrical phenomenon, the nature of which has remained unclear for a very long time. Mostly sailors de alt with him. The lights manifested themselves as follows: when a ship hit a thunderstorm, the tops of its masts began to blaze with a bright flame. The explanation for the phenomenon turned out to be very simple - the fundamental role was played by the high voltage of the electromagnetic field, which is always observed before the start of a thunderstorm. But not only sailors can deal with lights. Pilots of large airliners have also encountered this phenomenon when flying through clouds of ash thrown into the sky by volcanic eruptions. The fires are caused by the friction of ash particles against the skin.
Both lightning and St. Elmo's fires are electrical phenomena that many have seen, but far from everyone managed to encounter ball lightning. Their nature has not yet been fully explored. Usually, eyewitnesses describe ball lightning as a bright, luminous formation of a spherical shape, randomly moving in space. Three years ago, a theory was put forward that called into question the reality of their existence. If it was previously believed that a variety of ball lightning are electrical phenomena, then the theory suggested thatthey are nothing but hallucinations.
There is another phenomenon that has an electromagnetic nature - the northern lights. It occurs due to the impact of the solar wind on the upper atmosphere. The northern lights look like flashes of various colors and are usually recorded at fairly high latitudes. There are, of course, exceptions - if solar activity is high enough, then inhabitants of temperate latitudes can also see the radiance in the sky.
Electrical phenomena are quite an interesting subject of study for physicists around the planet, as most of them require detailed justification and serious study.
