(ORDO NEWS) — In the atmosphere of the Earth and a number of other planets, lightning sometimes occurs – electrical discharges, the voltage of which ranges from tens of millions to a billion volts.
It is one of the most powerful forces in nature, hitting at 100,000 kilometers per second and heating the air to 27,000 degrees Celsius five times the surface temperature of the Sun.
If lightning hits a person, he dies at the same moment, of course, if he was not lucky enough to be born Roy Sullivan, who survived 7 lightning strikes.
Lightning often strikes tall giraffes as well as trees, causing forest fires. If lightning strikes sand or quartz, they fuse and form fulgurite.
Recently, scientists have found that very rare quasi-crystals are found inside fulgurites – previously it was thought that they were formed only in meteorites.
What is fulgurite
In short, fulgurite is sand, quartz, or silica that has been baked as a result of a lightning strike. It is a hollow branched tube with a smooth and sometimes covered with small bubbles inner surface.
The outer part of fulgurite is covered with grains of sand and has a brown, gray, black or greenish color. Often the size of fulgurite is small – it is a cone-shaped tube as thick as a finger.
But there are also large fulgurites, and sometimes a fulgurite carefully dug out of the ground can be compared to a tree root or branch.
Fulgurites are formed only when lightning strikes sand. The fact is that between the grains of sand there is always air and moisture.
When powerful lightning strikes the sand, electricity melts the grains of sand in a fraction of a second, and also heats the air and moisture, thereby causing an explosive increase in air pressure between the grains of sand.
The expanding air causes a cylindrical cavity to form inside the molten sand. After that, the mold is rapidly cooled – the result is a solid fulgurite.
Fulgurites are extremely rare. Most often they are found on the tops of mountains or in regions with increased thunderstorm activity.
The place on Earth where thunderstorms almost never stop is the region where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela).
There are up to 200 thunderstorm days a year. During periods of activity, up to 28 lightning per minute can be observed there at night.
We mentioned this phenomenon of nature in the article “Which places are most often struck by lightning?”.
What are quasicrystals
The fulgurites formed after lightning strikes are of great interest to scientists. Recently, researchers have studied fulgurites found in a sandy area in Nebraska.
Inside them, they found quasi-crystals – very rare formations, the existence of which was previously considered impossible.
They were found only in meteorites that fell to the ground, and the presence of quasicrystals in fulgurites was a big surprise for scientists.
What is the peculiarity of quasicrystals
In nature, crystalline bodies like particles of table salt are interesting because their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats itself in three-dimensional space.
If a solid does not have a repeating structure of atoms, they are called amorphous solids – glass is an example.
Quasicrystals cannot be attributed to either of these two groups – and the atoms are arranged in a lattice structure, but it does not repeat itself.
The rarest crystals in the world
Scientists began to think about the existence of quasicrystals only in the 1980s, and then this concept was considered impossible. It was believed that solids could be crystalline or amorphous, with nothing in between.
However, quasi-crystals have subsequently been found inside meteorites, which heat up to high temperatures during their passage through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that quasicrystals can only form under extreme conditions, at incredibly high temperatures and pressures.
After that, scientists managed to find quasi-crystals at the site of a nuclear bomb test in 1945. And, finally, it has recently become known that quasicrystals can also arise as a result of a lightning strike on sand.
Scientists found such a formation in the Sandhills, Nebraska area – there was a thunderstorm and lightning struck power lines.
At the moment, they find it difficult to answer what caused the formation of fulgurite: lightning or electricity from power lines.
But, according to the calculations of the authors of the scientific work, in order to obtain fulgurite, the sand must be heated to at least 1710 degrees Celsius.
What are quasicrystals for?
According to scientists, the new discovery makes it possible to develop a technology for creating rare quasi-crystals in the laboratory.
Quasicrystals are needed by scientists because they can be useful in electronics and other technology.
Here are the most important properties of quasicrystals:
- At low temperatures, quasicrystals have a high electrical resistance, and with increasing temperature, it decreases
- Most quasi-crystalline alloys are diamagnetic, that is, materials that are pushed out of a magnetic field. But alloys with manganese are paramagnetic, which are drawn into a magnetic field
- Quasi-crystals are less plastic than crystals, so they can be used to increase the strength of metal products
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