Lightning is a familiar sight throughout the solar system. Not only do bolts strike on Earth, but they also sizzle through the air on Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and (most likely) Neptune.

Mysterious "sprites" and "elves" dance high in the Earth's atmosphere — but these aren't mythical creatures, they're disks, globes and tendrils of light caused by lightning. Now scientists for the ...

Berkeley - Photos of red sprites, blue jets, elves and sprite halos are now flowing into the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory from the first satellite instrument devoted ...

A team of Spanish researchers has made a high-speed recording of elves and sprites in storms, fleeting and luminous electric phenomena produced in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Their analysis of ...

Red spites, a type of transient luminous event or TLE, appear in the upper atmosphere above a thunderstorm in Oklahoma in April 2025. Photograph by Paul Smith Our atmosphere is like one big electrical ...

Jupiter may be the first planet besides Earth known to host atmospheric light shows called “sprites” or “elves.” Scientists suspected these atmospheric phenomena might appear on other planets that ...

Near the edge of space, sprites and elves dance, but there's nothing mythical about them. Sprites and elves are reddish, ultrafast bursts of electricity that are born near the edge of space, about 50 ...

Just in time for Halloween, NASA announced results from the space agency's Juno mission that suggest "sprites" or "elves" could be frolicking in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Named for mischievous fairy ...

NASA's Juno spacecraft just captured images of colorful bursts of lightning-like electricity high in Jupiter's atmosphere. These phenomena — jellyfish-shaped "sprites" and glowing disks called "elves" ...