how is lightning and thunder formed animaiton a science with bobert video short

Most lightning happens inside a cloud, but when a build up of positive charge occurs on the ground beneath the cloud, lightning can occur between the cloud and the ground. No one knows why lightning forms a zig zag path but scientists do know where the sound of thunder comes from. lightning is about one inch wide and is six times hotter than the surface of the sun! Since lightning travels so fast inside the cloud or between the cloud and the ground, the super heated air has no time to expand! this heated air can be 100 times greater than atmospheric pressure... the super hot air explodes outward like a bomb all along the channel where the lightning passed and forms a shock wave in every direction. Like any explosion, a loud booming burst of noise occurs! Since light travels a million times faster than sound, we always see lightning before hearing thunder. In fact, every five seconds between lightning and thunder corresponds to about one mile of distance from where the lightning occurred. We can see some of these properties of lightning with Dr. Smith’s spark generator. The charge builds up on the terminals of the spark generator as Dr. Smith rotates the knob increasing the voltage until finally enough opposite charge exists on each terminal post that a spark is generated between the terminals. you can hear sparks because just like with lightning, the air where the spark traveled is so hot it does not have time to expand and simply explodes outward with a burst of noise. This is actually thunder but on a miniature scale! Notice how as the distance between the posts gets smaller the sparks become more frequent. Not as much charge is necessary to be built up to generate short sparks. As the gap increases the sparks become less frequent because more charge is needed to be built up in order to overcome the insulating properties of air.