Last week, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured a lightning strike over Europe. But in contrast to most lightning, this electrical outburst was not a bunch of spiky tendrils however relatively a giant blue bubble over the continent.

The “transient luminous event,” as such higher atmospheric lightning is thought, was noticed in a timelapse taken by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. This kind of lightning appears completely different from the flashes that happen in and under storm clouds and tends to be a lot bigger.

There are sprites, that are vertical, supertall vibrant flashes of crimson or bluish-green mild; jets, which are typically blue and happen within the stratosphere; and elves, that are very high-altitude electromagnetic pulses. There are additionally trolls, that are jet-like, and different magically named luminous types of lightning that occur above the clouds.

The colours of the varied phenomena are formed by the ambiance; on Earth, nitrogen makes sprites seem crimson, however on Jupiter, a hydrogen-rich ambiance would make sprites blue.

Since 2018, the ASIM experiment aboard the ISS has noticed these types of big lightning. It is the successor to the sooner THOR experiment proposed by Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen, who caught blue jets and crimson sprites on video over the Bay of Bengal in 2015.

These types of lightning are terribly transient, so researchers had to return by Mogensen’s footage frame-by-frame to pick particular phenomena. Similarly, Pesquet’s picture of the current transient luminous occasion was extracted from an extended timelapse of the evening sky.

In a caption for the brand new picture posted online, Pesquet famous that the ISS is well-positioned to {photograph} such phenomena, because it flies over the equator, the place extra thunderstorms happen. This specific occasion popped up someplace southeast of Italy, as the image exhibits.

“What is fascinating about this lightning is that just a few decades ago they had been observed anecdotally by pilots and scientists were not convinced they actually existed,” he wrote. “Fast forward a few years and we can confirm elves, and sprites are very real and could be influencing our climate too!”

More observations like this one are certain to return and reveal extra about these good pure phenomena, so dazzling that they required supernatural names.

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