Lighting and thunder?

Question

y does it lighting then thunder in a storm??

Answer 1

they really happen at the same time but light travels faster then sound so you see the lightning first

Answer 2

Light travels faster than sound! so lightening first and then thunder!

Answer 3

The sky is filled with electric charge. In a calm sky, the + and - charges are evenly interspersed thoughout the atmosphere. Therefore, a calm sky has a neutral charge.

Inside a thunderstorm, electric charge is spread out differently. A thunderstorm consists of ice crystals and hailstones. The ice crystals have a + charge, while the hailstones have a - charge. The ice crystals are pushed to the top of the thunderstorm cloud by an updraft. Meanwhile, the hailstones are pushed to the bottom of the thunderstorm by its downdraft. Thus, the thunderstorm's + and - charges are separated into two levels: the + charge at the top and the - charge at the bottom.

giant spark 54.000F charge.

You see a flash of lightning across the night sky. Five seconds later, your hear the rumble of thunder. If lightning and thunder come from the same source, then why don't they occur at the same time?

Actually, they do occur at the same time. The time difference that you sense is due to the way sound and light travel. Light travels extremely fast (300,000,000 m/s). In fact, it is faster than anything else. Sound travels at a measly 343 m/s through air. Therefore we can see light in an instant, but it takes a while to hear thunder.

Sound has another disadvantage because it tends to bounce off molecules in the air. This makes the sound travel in all different directions. The further away the source of the sound is, the more the sound gets distorted.

Therefore, when you hear rumbling thunder, the lightning bolt was far away. When you hear a crack or boom of thunder, the lightning bolt is close to you (<100 m).

The cause of thunder has been the subject of centuries of speculation and scientific inquiry. The first recorded theory is attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the third century BC, and an early speculation was that it was caused by the collision of clouds. Subsequently, numerous other theories have been proposed. By the mid-19th century, the accepted theory was that lightning produced a vacuum. In the 20th century a consensus evolved that thunder must begin with a shock wave in the air due to the sudden thermal expansion of the plasma in the lightning channel. In a fraction of a second the air is heated to a temperature approaching 28,000 °C (50,000 °F)[1]. This heating causes it to expand outward, plowing into the surrounding cooler air at a speed faster than sound would travel in that cooler air. The outward-moving pulse that results is a shock wave, similar in principle to the shock wave formed by an explosion, or at the front of a supersonic aircraft. More recently, this consensus has been eroded by the observation that measured overpressures in simulated lightning are greater than what could be achieved by the amount of heating found. Alternative proposals rely on electrodynamic effects of the massive current acting on the plasma in the bolt of lightning. [2]

Answer 4

Lightning creates the thunder, and because light is faster than sound