The sun’s surface has a temperature of 6,000 kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit). Do you think a lightning bolt can reach a higher temperature? Well, a lightning bolt can reach a temperature of 30,000 kelvin (53,540). That is 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun!
So let’s look at some science of these things. First, the surface of the sun is by far the coolest layer of the sun. The core of the sun can reach a temperature of 15 million kelvin (27 million degrees Fahrenheit). The sun’s atmosphere (the corona) is also a lot hotter, temperatures of 500,000 kelvin (900,000 degrees Fahrenheit) are common in the corona. How is that possible?
Jim Klimchuk, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland thinks he knows the answer to this question. He explains that the sun’s corona is so hot due to relatively small explosions that happen constantly all around the sun, called nanoflares.
The sun’s core, corona, surface and flares (the imaged flares are not on nanoflare scale).
"The explosions are called nanoflares because they have one-billionth the energy of a regular flare," said Klimchuk. "Despite being tiny by solar standards, each packs the wallop of a 10 megaton hydrogen bomb. Millions of them are going off every second across the sun, and collectively they heat the corona."
So, the sun’s surface is a lot cooler than the atmosphere, but why does lightning reach such a high temperature?
Power is energy per second, and the energy per second in lighting can be very high, but it only lasts a really, really, short time, like tens of microseconds. So, the rate the energy gets released as heat, can be very large. Lightning is an extremely powerful phenomenon on Earth.
The energy of lightning ultimately comes from the sun. As the sun heats up the Earth, some places get hotter than the other. Warmer air rises, since its less dense. When the air is moist, that column of air can rise much further than it would rise normally. In this process, the moist in the air becomes ice.
"You can get very efficient charge transfer, so that you get positive and negative charges separated by the bouncing ice," Holzworth (University of Washington physics professor) says. "It turns out that when you have ice collisions, there's some likelihood that, at certain places in the cloud, smaller ice formations such as snowflakes are going to get charged positive, leaving behind negative charge on the hail stones or the soft hail."
The lighter, positively charged ice particles continue to rise even higher, while the heavier, negatively charged ice particles lose their altitude. This separates the charge, it’s a process called gravity separation.
It creates an electric field. This ionizes the air around the clouds, which in turn separates air molecules into positive ions and electrons. These electrons move very easy through ionized air, much easier than the positive ions. Once a channel of ionized air is established from a cloud to a grounded point, or the ground itself, a current flows in the form of a lightning stroke. This current neutralizes the charge separations, and releases an extreme amount of energy, also in the form of heat.
Schematic image of the charge separation, which causes lightning.
Eventhough a lightning bolt cannot reach a higher temperature than the sun itself, it can get 5 times hotter than the coldest layer of the sun, which is the surface.
Next time when lightning strikes you, make sure to get yourself into the surface of the sun to cool down.
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Sources:
https://www.seeker.com/is-lightning-hotter-than-the-sun-1765058578.html
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/sounding-rockets/strong-evidence-for-coronal-heating-theory-presented-at-2015-tess-meeting
http://kids.britannica.com/kids/assembly/view/105765
http://www.hk-phy.org/iq/lightning/lightning_e.html
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