Lightning’s Secret Escape to Space

This captivating image depicts a rare atmospheric phenomenon known as a blue jet—an upward-shooting form of lightning that propagates from the top of a thunderstorm into the stratosphere.

The scene shows Earth from space, with the curved horizon glowing faintly from atmospheric layers and airglow. A massive thunderstorm cloud dominates the view, illuminated from within by internal lightning flashes. Rising dramatically from the cloud top is a bright blue column of light, narrowing into a cone as it shoots upward, accompanied by smaller blue discharges below and a faint circular glow higher up (likely representing related phenomena like “elves”—ring-shaped optical and UV emissions in the ionosphere).

The overlaid text accurately describes the event: upward lightning extending toward space, observed by the European Space Agency’s Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) instrument on the International Space Station. This specific observation occurred during a thunderstorm on February 26, 2019, near the island of Nauru in the central Pacific Ocean.

Blue jets are part of a family of transient luminous events (TLEs) that occur above thunderstorms. Unlike typical downward lightning, they form due to electrical breakdowns between the positively charged cloud top and negatively charged regions above, lasting fractions of a second and reaching altitudes up to about 50 km (31 miles). ASIM’s detailed measurements in 2019—including five intense microsecond-scale blue flashes that initiated the jet—provided groundbreaking insights into their origins, as published in Nature.

However, this particular image appears to be an artistic rendering or simulation inspired by the event (often based on ESA animations or composite visualizations), rather than a direct photograph from ASIM. Real observations from space are typically less vivid and more data-oriented, but this illustration beautifully captures the awe-inspiring scale and beauty of the phenomenon. 0 “LARGE” 3 “LARGE” 7 “LARGE”

These related images show authentic captures and animations of blue jets and similar TLEs observed from the ISS.