Lightning in space caused by Nebula

[TheDayman]

Is lighting in space possible in nebulae? Or is lightning something that requires an atmosphere? I ask because I've seen a few genre's of space games displaying lightning caused by dense nebulae. For example, here with Stellaris (which looks awesome BTW): https://youtu.be/bxTT258PmNc?t=57

If it is possible, I hope Elite will one day have nebulae like this. If it isn't, which I assume to be true, then that's okay but I am curious.

 

[Witzo]

I don't think lightning exists in nebulae. What does exist, is lightning at planets with atmospheres and gas giants. I'd like to see that in the game!

 

[Ashnak]

Don't be too fast to exclude it - the main problem would be to get the charge separation. And of course a sufficiently dense gas so that the flashes will actually be visible.
Might be possible in gas rings around stellar objects (as it is, I believe, shown in that clip). But I don't think ED's stellar simulation is up to that - we don't even have accretion disks.
:O That's the word - of course you can have lighning like phenomena in space. Athough you probably wouldn't want to be too close: in an accretion disk.

 

[TheDayman]

Don't be too fast to exclude it - the main problem would be to get the charge separation. And of course a sufficiently dense gas so that the flashes will actually be visible.
Might be possible in gas rings around stellar objects (as it is, I believe, shown in that clip). But I don't think ED's stellar simulation is up to that - we don't even have accretion disks.
:O That's the word - of course you can have lighning like phenomena in space. Athough you probably wouldn't want to be too close: in an accretion disk.

So in other words, lightning (or any form of it) would be impossible in say a planetary nebula? Interesting, thanks guys. Have some rep.

 

[Mengy]

There is lightning in nebulas in Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan.






So yes, it must exist.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

I think the problem here is that too many SciFi series (yes Star Trek, I'm looking at you) have given people the impression that nebulas are basically thick, glowy fog. The truth (as I understand it) is that most are only a little bit denser (overall) than hard vacuum.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Nebula = expanding gas right?
Most of the gas is actually colourless and the fancy folks assign colours to said gasses, generally the bare pictures with contrast etc enhanced look like this:
Full article here: http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2015/01/stars-without-makeup/

Yes static electricity could be carried between gas particles but I have a feeling without confines of atmosphere the particles will be too far apart to meaningfully gather and release that much energy (bearing in mind lightning is an insane amount of electrical energy).

One thing I can say for certain is that no such items are present in Elite.


Edit: There are a few articles on lightning in nebula actually a paper here saying what I just wrote:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103597958462

"We find that development of a large-scale electric field strong enough to produce discharges does not occur under conditions characteristic of protostellar nebulae. This is mainly a result of the fact that the high electrical conductivity of the environment and the relatively low density of solid particles combine to yield a situation in which the large scale electric fields, as well as the electric charges segregated on the particles are short circuited by the highly mobile electrons and ions. We also consider the possibility of lightning in altered nebula environments with higher than canonical dust density, such as a dust subdisk."

Science! It may not be exciting but it's accurate.

Although this paper says it's possible in specific chemical compositions: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103599962450