Is it possible to have lightning without thunder?
549998
Yes and no.  While if there's lightning there's going to be thunder, it could be occurring so far up or away that you might see it but just not be able to hear the thunder.
224271
Hello,\nLightening is caused due to the build up of electrons in the upper layers of the clouds during a storm. These electrons are attracted towards the positive potential of the earth, but the air gives a stiff resistance and does not allow the electricity to pass through. But when a huge potential has been accumulated, the electricity forces its way through the air molecules. This causes a lot of friction and hence releases heat energy. A tremendous amount of heat energy. This causes the air molecules to vibrate and this produces the cracking sound known as thunder. Thunder rattles the windows if it is loud enough. Sound is just the air particles vibrating and when the vibrating air molecules hit the window, they cause it to rattle. Lightning usually strikes the highest point and the most positively charged area. This is becuz lightning looks for the easiest way out of air. A high place means it has to travel less distance...
893111
no it is not harmfull however if lightning stikes at your house or a neighbours your electricity will surge therefore damaging everything that is pluged into an electrical socket. \n\nit is not harmful if nothing near you gets struck by lightning!
352022
You wouldn't call it lightning, because that's what you see. You could call it "the sound of lightning" but we are generally pretty lazy - and that's too long!
439061
Lightning is electricity. When the clouds build up too much electrons and the voltage between the cloud and the ground is great enough to cause air to break down and conduct, you get lighting. Its like a spark.
1166630
Yes water is a highly effective ground which lightening needs to get to the earth. Lightening can strike you even through a window when you are in a house and the window is closed. extremely rare though. The water bed is safer, unless it leaks on you. Don't worry the odds of you being hit is like winning the lottery. I bet you win the lottery.
805038
If you study the details of lightening, u will find that there are some strikes that are between the clouds. Some hit the earth. There is some detailed mechnisms described in books. There u will find terms like pilot leader, streamers, etc.\n\nWhen the lightning occurs, the air gets ionised. So, even if u capture a  Lightening in your tower, the air will become an ionised conductor, so the charge will go to thwe ground. \n\nThe strike from ground occurs as well as the strike from the cloud. \n\nAbove all it is not feasible.\n\nThank you.
863382
Yes, put a lightening rod on your barn, home, or skyscraper.  When the lightening bolt strikes, there will be an electric current of MANY amps from the top of the lightening rod to the earth where it's grounded.  At some point in the circuit, put a metallic conductor parallel to the lightening rod.   By Faraday's Law, a voltage will be induced in your conductor.  Discharge this into a capacitor (possibly a very LARGE one) and you have stored the energy. \nThere are some serious problems with heat melting the conductors, safety, etc, but those are engineering problems.
969310
They're simultaneous.  Thunder is the noise made by the lightning.  You may experience the two at different times (always thunder second) because light waves and sound waves travel at different speeds.  They actually occur at the same time, your perception of them causes the distinction.
1164752
Here's a website that will explain it for you....http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning5.htm
706628
Although there may be no observable leakage path for DC or low frequency AC, at RF it radiates. Yes, it is certainly possible to light fluorescent tubes by RF, without any connection. \n\nI've read of people living in high-rise bldgs in NYC in the beam path of broadcast antennas (radio or tv stations) and they did not have to pay anything to the electric company to light their apartments! Just use fluorescent tubes. \n\n(To be able to sleep, they had to put the tubes in the closet! Makes you wonder what all that RF might have been doing to the family jewels and their precious essence!)\n\n22 NOV 06, 0415 hrs, GMT.
1139758
Yes, it could and we will harness this form of power in the future.\nHowever, please remember that lightning is used by nature as a means of providing food for the soil bacteria with nitrites and nitrates. Like anything else, if we become greedy and harness all the energy, we may create environmental problems, such as food production. This is in parallel with harnessing water in a river, and then holding up all the water to generate electricity and not let other creatures that depend on the water flow have that water.
936910
A lightning before death
1158044
No it isn't!\n\nWhy? Lightning! One of the easiest ways for lightning to travel into your home is through your water pipes, and it will travel right to your body since water has a high conductance. Things to stay away from include phones and computers, since lightning may also travel through the lines that are outside of the house.\n\nRemember, lightning doesn't need a metal object to travel into your home, anything that is a conductor will do. For more information, check out the great page Wikipedia has set up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_conduction
98380
.   There is something called ball lightning. It drifts slowly along and can release its energy by exploding. I read that it had been reproduced in the lab using super high voltage generators.\n.    The light from a lightning bolt travels at the speed of light but the lightning bolt travels much slower. A lightning bolt consists of ionized atoms physically moveing through the air from the cloud toward the ground and a charge comeing up from the ground to meet it. I believe the whole process takes one hundreth of a second.
18286
If a lightning strike is a sufficient distance from the observer, sound from the strike will not be heard. These silent bolts are called heat lightning. Lightning bolts produce thunder, but the thunder sound does not travel all the way to the observer if the observer is too far away.\n\nThe movement of sound in the atmosphere depends on the atmospheric properties of the air such as temperature and density. Because temperature and density change with height, the sound of thunder is refracted through the troposphere. This refraction results in spaces of volume in which the thunder does not propagate through. For more information, please refer to the source
339971
"A bolt of lightning can reach temperatures approaching 28,000 kelvins (50,000 degrees Fahrenheit) in a split second. This is about five times hotter than the surface of the sun."  The core of the sun reaches 13.6 MK (about 500 times the temperature reached by lightning).