How is it that lightning is 4x hotter than the sun yet crazy thunderstorms don’t make the surface warm?
In: Physics
The surface of the sun isn’t that hot. It’s about 6000°C. A light bulb is halfway between that and room temperature (20°C) at about 3000°C. Touching a light bulb is a little hot, but far away you can’t even feel it. Lightning is hot, but the sun’s surface really isn’t that high of bar. The inside of the sun, we think that’s 15,000,000°C. Now that’s hot.
Lightning isn’t very big. While it’s larger than a lightbulb, it’s still a thin line maybe a kilometre or two long. The sun is quite large, even depsite being very far away. It takes up way more area in your vision than a lightning bolt, so it’s going to heat things up more near you.
Lightning lasts for a fraction of a second. The sun shines for 12 hours a day. Needless to say, the sun is going to heat things up more. A prolonged electrical arc will throw some noticeable heat, say being near an arc welder.
So while lightning is quite a bit hotter than the sun, and it would put out more heat per surface area than the sun, it’s a lot smaller and shorter lived than the sun.
The lightning is extremely brief. Locally (where they strike) they do in fact warm the surface, sometimes causing fires, but overall a lightning is just way too brief and isolated to do any serious warming
When you out stuff in an oven, just because it’s 400 degree Fahrenheit, it doesn’t instantly cook. Even if you crank that temp up to 1000, it will still take time to cook.
And that’s the primary limitation of lightning: it’s a lot of energy, but in a very small spot and in microseconds. It’s enough to start a fire if there’s dry tinder nearby. But not enough time to cook you necessarily if it hit you. Besides that, it’s also being dissipated in more than just the thing it passes through (when lightning hits you, it’s mostly trying to get through you, not hang out).
Contrast; the sun sends energy continuously. If lightning was continuous, it would definitely heat up the planet.
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