Bolts of lightning expand by sending out trees of tiny filaments called streamers, which are ionized air channels. Logic dictates that the channel heads should repel one another because they carry the same electric charge. But, as any lightning-watcher can vouch, streamers touch quite often (pictured).
Ute Ebert and her colleagues at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, have simulated how streamers connect. They have demonstrated that, in a gaseous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen (as in Earth's atmosphere), streamers come together more easily at lower pressures. Thus their model could explain the observations. The work paves the way to simulating a complete lightning fork, not just single streamers.
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Physics: A bolt from the blue. Nature 455, 4 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/455004c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/455004c
