From time immemorial, mankind has been trying 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 trembled blissfully before the lights of St. Elm, and our contemporaries are extremely afraid of meeting with ball lightning.
All these are electrical phenomena. In nature, everything, even you and I, carries an electric charge. If objects with large charges of different polarity come closer together, a physical interaction occurs, the visible result of which becomes a stream of cold plasma, colored, usually in yellow or purple, between them. 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 hit them on the surface of the Earth. As a rule, lightning strikes as a target freestanding tall objects, because, according to physical laws, the transmission of a strong charge requires the shortest distance between a thundercloud and the surface of the Earth. To protect buildings from lightning striking them, their owners install lightning rods on the roofs, which are high metal structures with grounding, which, when lightning strikes, allows you to divert the entire discharge into the soil.
The lights of St. Elmo are another electrical phenomenon whose nature has remained unclear for a very long time. Mostly sailors dealt with him. The fires showed themselves as follows: when a ship fell into a thunderstorm, the tops of its masts began to blaze with a bright flame. The explanation of the phenomenon turned out to be very simple - the high voltage of the electromagnetic field, which is observed every time before the start of a thunderstorm, played a fundamental role. But not only sailors can deal with lights. Pilots of large airliners also encountered this phenomenon when flying through clouds of ash thrown into the sky by volcanic eruptions. Lights arise from the friction of ash particles on the skin.
Both lightnings and the lights of St. Elmo are electrical phenomena that many have seen, but far from everyone managed to encounter ball lightning . Their nature has not been fully studied. Eyewitnesses usually 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 cast doubt on the reality of their existence. If previously it was believed that a variety of ball lightning are electrical phenomena, then the theory suggested that they are nothing more than hallucinations.
There is another phenomenon of electromagnetic nature - the northern lights. It arises as a result of the influence of the solar wind on the upper atmosphere. Aurora borealis is similar to flashes of the most different colors and is fixed, as a rule, in rather high latitudes. There are, of course, exceptions - if solar activity is high enough, then the inhabitants of temperate latitudes can see the radiance in the sky.
Electrical phenomena are a rather interesting object of study for physicists around the planet, since most of them require detailed justification and serious study.