There is nothing serious behind these happenings, Scientists say.
This is due to Weather Phenomenon.
Sun dogs, or parhelia, are little back-up suns that appear on either side of the sun. They are the Pips to the sun’s Gladys, the Lion and the Witch to the sun’s Wardrobe, and they look way cooler than rainbows.
What is it that makes these parhelia possible? Only the most badass shape in the whole world: the hexagon. It’s the geometric shape that rhymes with sex and means ‘an evil spell.’ It’s balanced, edgy. It’s got an angle on everything. It’s what the pentagon would have been if the government hadn’t been too cheap to add that last wall. There’s nothing that the hexagon can’t do. When it gets cold enough, hexagons fall from the sky. Literally.
When water freezes it forms hexagonal crystals. Sometimes the crystals are long, pencil-shaped objects, but much of the time they are flat disks. When they fall, the flat side turns parallel to the earth, due to Io9’s old friend,the Bernoulli Effect. When the disk tilts so that an edge pushes out, the air around it rushes past faster. This creates a low pressure zone and pulls the crystal’s edges out harder, until it is flat-side-down.
This leaves the hexagonal shape of the crystal open to exploitation by miscreant sun beams. Most of us know that certain substances, including ice, can bend light. It’s difficult to understand, though, how this would make duplicate suns appear.
This video shows a possible UFO or strange phenomena of some type occurring at the cloud tops over Maryland. As a meteorologist I am not personally aware of what could be causing this .
Years ago during museum exhibits work I was explaining rainbow optics …and also explaining thunderstorm dynamics. I stumbled across a strange idea: shouldn’t the strong electrostatic fields in thunderstorms have a visible effect on rainbows?”, he speculated.
“E-fields should slightly distort falling raindrops, causing the light distribution of a rainbow to change slightly. Sometimes we should notice that a rainbow suddenly “flicks” during a lightning bolt, then slowly changes to its initial pattern as the e-fields build before another strike.”
Rather than distortions of droplets, perhaps these are “sundogs” or parhelia light patterns caused by aligned ice crystals. A changing e-field could rotate all the ice plates or needles, causing the sundog to suddenly change shape and position. Or less likely, perhaps some condensing droplets are changing size under e-field influence (growth/shrinkage of small droplets is known to be altered by strong electrostatic fields.)”
We do know that ice crystals can populate thunderheads. And if Beaty’s “strange idea” is that they could align themselves under the influence of changing electrical fields, as he notes, this has been observed in laboratory conditions (Foster, Hallet, 2002, 2008). And it has also been observed in situ, due to thunderstorms, with meteorological radars (Caylor, Chandrasekar, 1996).
The big news here would be that these phenomena would combine to produce these light shows we may be seeing in these different videos, with several witnesses from different locations in Maryland, USA and Malaysia….
Beaty suggested they could be leaping sundogs, but like the rainbow’s end, you could chase parhelia but never reach them. Their position in the sky is only apparent. Ice crystals changing their orientation could change the configuration of halos, but it would probably not look like what we see in the videos, nor would it be dependent on the position of the thunderhead.
Instead, this could be something more direct than rainbows or halos, by having ice crystals actually changing the way they are reflecting streams of sunlight.
There are certainly many other possibilities, from hoaxes to a more prosaic mechanical action – like a thunder shockwave. But the behavior of the leaping streams of light, by almost instantly changing (apparently faster than a shockwave, thus eliminating mechanical action), and then slowly returning to the initial configuration, is certainly indicative that Beaty’s original suggestion of electrical fields influencing suspended ice crystals or droplets may be on to a fascinating, and so far unknown natural phenomenon.
There must be other records of this around, fromvideo sharing sites to perhaps even historical accounts, mixed and confused with all kinds of other things. You see, this may be an actual unidentified aerial phenomenon being discovered… through Youtube.
We do live in interesting times. [with thanks to Bill Beaty, Martin Shough and Manuel Borraz]
You must be logged in to post a comment.