Can you survive if lightning hits you?

Of every 10 people struck, nine will survive. But they could suffer a variety of short- and long-term effects: cardiac arrest, confusion, seizures, dizziness, muscle aches, deafness, headaches, memory deficits, distractibility, personality changes and chronic pain, among others.

Can a lightning strike be hotter than the sun?

Air is a very poor conductor of electricity and gets extremely hot when lightning passes through it. In fact, lightning can heat the air it passes through to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5 times hotter than the surface of the sun).

What is a sprite in the sky?

Sprites or red sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are usually triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground.

Is it possible to survive a lightning strike?

Not all lightning strikes are equal. The direct strike, straight from above, is, unsurprisingly, the deadliest. And yet, when you consider what a lightning strike actually does to a person, it seems impossible that anyone could survive.

How much hotter is lightning than the Sun?

Lightning, or at least some forms of it, can get up to five times hotter than the sun. According to NASA, a return strike — when a bolt of lightning shoots up back to the clouds after hitting the ground — can reach temperatures of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

How dangerous is it to get burned by lightning?

The danger is the damage caused to nerves from electricity. As /u/emperri points out, people do get burned by lightning because of the heat. They survive because the strike itself is short, and it’s not hot for very long. Indeed, duration is very important.

What is the temperature of a lightning strike?

The electricity of a lightning strike does not have a temperature, per se. Heat is produced when electricity flows through resistance. Air is a very good insulator, so there’s a lot of resistance, therefore air around lightning gets very hot.