Does lightning travel at the speed of light?
Yes, the speed of light in air though, not c, which is the speed of light in a vacuum. While nothing with mass moves at the speed of light, including electrons and plasma, which are moving in a lightning strike, the electric field propagates at the speed of light and so from the time lightning starts moving at one end of a bolt until it starts moving at the other end will be separated by the time it takes the electric field (or light) to travel that distance. Actual particles may never even make it from one end of the lightning strike to the other. Those particles are moving fast, but not at the speed of light. That would be impossible.
How fast is lighting compared to the speed of light?
For the best answers, search on this site https://shorturl.im/avkT0 Please remember that "Star Trek" is science fiction and incorporates numerous concepts that do not, in reality, exist. In reality, the speed of light cannot be attained. But, if memory serves me, that was the idea in "Star Trek:" that warp speed is the speed of light, warp two is twice that, and so on.
From somewhere else,The bottom tip of a lightning bolt traveling from a cloud to the ground does travel rather quickly, although it travels at much less than the speed of light. A lightning discharge consists of electrons which have been stripped from their molecules flying through the air. They are accelerated by a strong electric field, a consequence of the big voltage difference between the cloud and the ground. They crash into air molecules on their way down and free other electrons, making a tube of ionized air. The "leader", the first stroke of a lightning discharge, actually proceeds in steps -- lengthening by about 30 meters at a time, taking about a microsecond (one millionth of a second) to do each step. There is a pause between steps of about 50 microseconds. The whole process may take a few milliseconds (one-thousanths of a second), providing enough time to perceive motion. Most of the charge flows after this leader makes electrical contact with the ground, however. A powerful "return stroke" releases much more energy. That's not the whole story, however -- a lightning flash may have only one return stroke or may have several tens of strokes using the same column of ionized air.Now my opinion, So anyways that's the lightning bolt. The actual light that we see travels of course at the speed of light in air, approximately [math]2*10^8m/s[/math].
Electrons have mass whereas photons (which make up light) do not.It is said that anything with even a negligible mass would need the infinite energy to get it to light speed.I am pretty sure that lightning does not have infinite energy.Coming back to the point, lightning travels at the speed of over 100 million kilometers (62 million miles) per hour.PS: I assumed you meant the return stroke and not the stepped leader.
What is the speed of lightning in mach?
What you are asking, I believe, is how fast does the bolt travel, not how fast is light from that bolt. Electron drift, which is the current within any conductor, including air when the voltage potential gets high enough, is in the order of 20,000 km/s. The actual speed varies with the conductor and other conditions. But most electron drifts hover between 15,000 kps and 25,000 kps. The speed of sound also varies. But we can specify a standard day and the speed of sound is 0.343333 kps. So the speed of a bolt through the air is N = 20000/.343 = 58309 Mach. Give or take.
Does lightning travel faster than light?
No. In fact, it travels slower than light. Electricity gets 'held up' by friction with the material it's traveling through. Lighting has two basic parts: the leader, and the main stroke. The leader is a packet of negative electric charge that descends from the cloud in jagged leaps. Its average speed is much slower than the speed of light. Once it reaches the ground, there is essentially a short circuit of ionized air, and the main stroke occurs. The main stroke is the visible part, and the electrons move at a significant fraction of the speed of light. However, no particle with mass (such as an electron) can ever reach or exceed the speed of light.
Lightning cannot occur outside of an atmosphere! The flash of light from lightning will move at nearly the speed of light through the atmosphere then at the speed of light (more-or-less) through the vacuum of space becoming visible to, say, inhabitants of the International Space Station.
Is there such thing as a "Baseball shaped lightning bolt"? Also, how does lightning form and how fast it go's
. There is something called ball lightning. It drifts slowly along and can release its energy by exploding. I read that it had been reproduced in the lab using super high voltage generators. . The light from a lightning bolt travels at the speed of light but the lightning bolt travels much slower. A lightning bolt consists of ionized atoms physically moveing through the air from the cloud toward the ground and a charge comeing up from the ground to meet it. I believe the whole process takes one hundreth of a second.
30,000 KHotter than acetylene/O2 torch (3773 K)Hotter than center of earth (6000 degC)Hotter than surface of sun (6000 K)Hotter than electrical arc (20,000 K)Hot enough to break triple bond in nitrogen (946 kJ/mol)Colder than center of sun (15,000,000 Celsius)Colder than temperature of nuclear thermal blast (100,000,000° C)Lower temperature than ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) 5.5 trillion degrees CelsiusIs Lightning Hotter than the Sun? : DNews The Chemistry of Nitrogen and Phosphorous LHC Smashes Highest Man-Made Temperature Record : DNews