The inspiration was researchers using rockets trailing thin wires to attract lightning. How does the tiny wire carry that much juice? It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma ...

Globally, lightning is responsible for over 4,000 fatalities ... field causes ambient electrons to "run away" and become a plasma: lightning. "As a physicist, I like to be able to understand ...

Plasma is the stuff that makes lightning flash, stars shine, and neon signs glow. It is a special state of matter, like a ...

The sun periodically ejects huge bubbles of plasma from its surface that contain an intense magnetic field. These events are called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. When two of these ejections ...

That sounds exotic compared to gasses, solids, and liquids, but it turns out that over 99% of the visible universe is plasma. Things like lightning, the sun, and neon signs are all forms of plasma.

These events correlated with the laser are quite faint events; they are not actually lightning strikes. The main limitation to overcome is the limited lifetime of the plasma channel. We need to ...