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Illustration of St. Elmo's fire on a ship at sea Electrostatic discharge flashes across the windscreen of a KC-10 cockpit.. St. Elmo's fire (also called witchfire or witch's fire) [1] is a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a corona discharge from a rod-like object such as a mast, spire, chimney, or animal horn [2] in an atmospheric electric field.
Pilots evacuating in preparation for Hurricane Idalia observed bright blue light outside their aircraft, an event called St. Elmo’s fire. Here’s what causes it.
St. Elmo's Fire and normal sparks both can appear when high electrical voltage affects a gas. St. Elmo's fire is seen during thunderstorms when the ground below the storm is electrically charged, and there is high voltage in the air between the cloud and the ground. The voltage tears apart the air molecules and the gas begins to glow.
St. Elmo's Fire was a summer movie, originally hitting theaters on June 28, 1985. A few months later, some fans decided to dress up as Billy Hicks for Halloween. "It was surreal. It was the first ...
The actor also teased what his character, saxophonist Billy Hicks, has been up to since the end of the original film. "As you remember, at the end of St. Elmo's Fire, he got on a bus to New York ...
He investigated ball lightning with Julio Rubinstein [9] and James R. Powell. [10] [11] They concluded that ball lightning is most likely a wandering St. Elmo's fire, a low-temperature soliton in the atmospheric electric current flow. He also put forward an in-depth interpretation of the engraving Melencolia I of Albrecht Dürer. [12]
When a sufficiently large positive lightning strike carries charges to the ground, the cloud top is left with a strongly negative net charge. This can be modeled as a quasi-static electric dipole and for less than 10 milliseconds a strong electric field is generated in the region above the thunderstorm.
The events of the story are centered on a Japanese solar power plant based in the planet Mercury called "Saint Elmo". Its name was based on the rare scientific phenomenon called St. Elmo's fire, named after Erasmus of Formiae. This phenomenon occurs in electrical weather at which high points (like masts on ships) will charge and give off a glow.