Gigantic jets are 50 times more powerful than typical lightning bolts and blast upwards to the edge of space.
Late last month, Puerto Rico-based photographer Frankie Lucena was taking pictures in his home country of a passing storm system that would soon evolve into Hurricane Franklin, when a rare phenomenon of nature flashed before his eyes: several enormous bolts of lightning, blasting straight upward out of a storm cloud and stopping just below the edge of space.
These remarkably unusual bolts are known as gigantic jets. Indeed, they are the rarest and most powerful type of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and packing more than 50 times the power of a typical lightning bolt. The upside-down bolts can climb more than 50 miles (80 km) above Earth's surface, touching the bottom of the ionosphere, the vast layer of electrically charged particles where the top of the atmosphere meets the bottom of outer space.
While rare, gigantic jets are not an unfamiliar sight during Atlantic hurricane season, though they are reported most frequently in tropical regions, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.
Scientists have known about this phenomenon for only about 20 years, and why the bolts shoot upward into the sky rather than slashing down to the ground, remains a mystery. It may be the result of some kind of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of the cloud, the authors of the study wrote, but the exact mechanism is still unknown.