Saint Elmo's fire. Fun physical experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Saint Elmo's fire. Physical experiments

Entertaining experiments in physics

Entertaining experiences at home / Physics experiments for children

It cannot be that you have not read about this interesting natural phenomenon. Sometimes on a tropical night, tassels of cold flame appear on the masts and yards of ships. These lights have been known for a very long time. They were seen by Columbus and Magellan, even Julius Caesar wrote about them, who once saw such a glow on the spears of his soldiers during a night hike through the mountains.

You too can get a semblance of these lights. Turn off the lights in the room, rub a sheet of Plexiglas with a dry rag and bring the half-open scissors close to it with the tips forward. It will still be quite far from the leaf, and on the tips of the scissors there will already appear trembling bundles of threads, glowing with a purple flame. If you listen closely, you may hear a slight hiss or buzz.

St. Elmo's Fire is cold. If, instead of scissors, a match is brought to a sheet of plexiglass, the fire will dance right on its head, but the head will not flare up.

Well, what does Saint Elmo have to do with it? Such lights often appeared on the spire of the church of St. Elmo in one of the cities of France. But in fact, these lights are obtained in much the same way as in our experience. Only instead of a rubbed sheet of plexiglass, an electrified cloud passes over a ship or a church.

Author: Galpershtein L.Ya.

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