Sprites spotted over Himalayas? Photographer captures rare gigantic jets

The image shared by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day last week shows gigantic jets shooting up from a thunderstorm towards the Himalayan mountains

A photographer shared a stunning image of a series of high-atmosphere lightning strikes, called gigantic jets, soaring above a thunderstorm over the Himalayan mountains straddling the border between Bhutan and China. Four long jets shooting up into space were captured through a composite image, which was also shared on X by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. 

The images, originally shot by a photographer named Li Xuanhua, were described by Nasa as being “a type of lightning discharge that occurs between some thunderstorms and the Earth's ionosphere high above them. They are an unusual type of lightning that is much different from regular cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning.”

Such dazzling gigantic jets can rise up to a height of 80 kilometres into space, all the way into the ionosphere. The jets can carry 50 times the power of regular lightning strike and can be very hard to spot. In fact, this higher-atmosphere lighting discharge has only been observed since the 21st century. 

Li said he was “lucky to have captured such a picture of gigantic jets over Himalayan mountains,” which he said he took on early morning of June 10, 2024. 

As Nasa said, this type of lightning is much different from regular cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning. The bottoms of gigantic jets appear similar to a cloud-to-above strike called blue jets, while the tops appear similar to upper-atmosphere red sprites.

The red colour and shape of the luminous discharge has led many experts to call the jets as “Red Sprites”. In fact, the  

What are Red Sprites?

Red Sprites are dazzling jets of red that can originate from high-intensity thunderstorms shooting up into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and last for only milliseconds or so, making them extremely hard to observe. And since these luminous discharges happen much above the cloud layer, they are hard to observe from the ground. The Sprites have been observed by high-altitude aircraft, and sometimes by the astronauts from the international space station. 

The Red Sprites, and gigantic jets are a class of upper-atmosphere phenomenon called Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), also including blue jets and “elves”. However, the Sprites are the most commonly observed lightning jets. Planets other than our earth have been observed to experience such phenomena and this class of lightning is currently an active area of research for scientists around the world.