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Fun Facts About Lightning

• Lightning is hotter than the sun. A lightning bolt can reach temperatures of 50,000°F, which is roughly five times hotter than the surface of the sun.
• Lightning strikes the earth roughly 100 times per second. This means over 3 billion flashes hit the earth every year.
• Despite the billions of lightning strikes each year, your odds of being struck are less than 1 in a million in any given year. Over the course of an 80-year lifetime, the odds are about 1 in 10,000. But if you spend most of your days outside, those odds go up considerably.
• Benjamin Franklin famously proved that lightning is a form of electricity by flying a kite during a thunderstorm in 1752. He attached a metal wire to a silk kite with a key at the end of the string which collected the electric charge from the storm clouds. This created a spark and proved his theory.
  
• When lightning strikes sand or soil, it will often instanteously melt and fuse the grains together, creating hollow glass tubes or crusts.
• Explosive volcanic eruptions, like those from Mount Vesuvius, can produce dramatic lightning within ash clouds during so-called dirty thunderstorms.
• Ball lightning is a rare, mysterious and short-lived atmospheric phenomenon that is still not fully understood. These glowing spheres reported during storms can range from pea-sized to several feet in diameter.
• Lightning has been detected on several planets in our solar system, most notably Jupiter. First observed in 1979, Jovian lightning is similar to Earth's, originating from clouds of water and ice, with most flashes near the poles.