SPRITES IN SPACE
In common with many weather phenomena, red lightning could in principle occur on other planets that have an atmosphere, not just Earth. It’s been known, for example, that ordinary lightning is a common occurrence in Jupiter’s atmosphere ever since NASA’S Voyager 1 probe flew past the giant planet in 1979. In the case of sprites specifically, researchers at Tel Aviv University carried out an experiment in 2011 to test whether they could occur on Jupiter, its neighbouring gas giant Saturn and our own near neighbour Venus. They recreated the atmospheres of these planets in their laboratory and passed electrical discharges through them. They found that under the right conditions, sprites could form on all three planets. In the case of Jupiter, the theory was finally confirmed in 2020 when observations from NASA’S Juno spacecraft showed that both sprites and elves do indeed occur in the planet’s upper atmosphere.