On March 5,1979, the Voyager spacecraft hurtled past Jupiter and sent back a grainy snapshot of something previously spotted only on Earth: bursts of lightning. It was proof that our home planet isn’t alone in atmospheric spectacle.
But it wasn’t surprising. After all, lightning is just a rush of electrons leading to an electric spark on an atmospheric scale — any atmosphere. In the years since, spacecraft have spotted bursts of lightning elsewhere in our solar system, from the cloud tops of Venus, to Saturn’s moon Titan, to an electrical storm so big and bright on Saturn itself that it shone even during the day.
Similarly, powerful streams of electricity almost certainly crackle in the skies of thousands of exoplanets strewn throughout the galaxy. But so far, there’s no proof. German physicist Christiane Helling of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wants to spot that extraterrestrial lightning, hundreds of thousands of light-years away. And since we don’t yet have faster-than-light travel, she’ll do it with increasingly powerful telescopic observations.
That search matters because lightning may come and go in an instant, but its electrical crackling can alter the chemical makeup of the air around it. In fact, the effects of lightning are so great that it might just be a vital ingredient of life itself.
