Science & TechFact

Lightning is five times hotter than the Sun's surface.

A lightning channel heats the air to around 30,000 °C, roughly five times the Sun's surface temperature. The air expands explosively; that shock wave is the thunder you hear. Light reaches you instantly, sound takes about three seconds per kilometer. Worldwide there are some 40 to 50 flashes every second; only about one in four reaches the ground.

Useful: Seconds between flash and thunder divided by three gives the distance in kilometers.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Physik Wetter

Difficulty:

Related cards

Counting seconds tells you how far away the storm is.Sound moves through 20 °C air at about 343 metres per second; light arrives practically instantly. …
Ten tonnes of air are resting on your desk.Standard air pressure at sea level is 101,325 pascals, about 1 kilogram of force per square …
Nobody sees the same rainbow you do.Sunlight enters raindrops, reflects inside them and fans out into colours on the way out. Red light …
A fair-weather cloud weighs as much as a hundred elephants.A typical cumulus cloud holds about half a gram of water per cubic meter. For a cloud one kilometer …
Contrails are clouds made of exhaust water.Burning kerosene produces water vapour. At 10 kilometres altitude it is about minus 50 degrees; the …
Colder than minus 273.15 degrees is impossible.Temperature measures how much particles move. At −273.15 °C, which is 0 kelvin, thermal motion is …
Every banana is slightly radioactive.Bananas are rich in potassium, and about 0.012 % of it is the radioactive isotope potassium-40. One …
No wind turbine can harvest more than 59 percent of the wind.In 1919 Albert Betz showed that a turbine can't stop the air completely, or it would pile up and …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic Science & Tech. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms