Lighting Sprites are colorful bursts of electricity that can stretch for more than 95 kilometers (58 miles) from cloud tops. These mysterious and beautiful lightning phenomena had only been captured in photos in 1994 and since then scientists haven't been able to look away from the light show the upper atmosphere provides. Now scientists from Tel Aviv University are proposing that lighting sprites can even be found in outer space.

PhD student Daria Dubrovin along with her supervisors Professor Colin Price of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences and Professor Yoav Yair of the Open University of Israel, and collaborators Professor Ute Ebert and Dr. Sander Nijdam from the Eindhoven Technical University in Holland, believe that Jupiter and Saturn which experiences 1,000 or more times more powerful lightning storms than Earth could also host lighting sprites in their upper atmosphere. To prove her theory, Dubrovin has re-created Jupiter and Saturn's planetary atmosphere in her laboratory.

Sprites are transient luminous events or TLEs that are similar to lightning. They are quite common on Earth but since they only occur in the mesosphere, sprites are hard to observe. Scientists believe that sprites occur when lighting creates an intense electrostatic field above the cloud it originates from. Red sprites occur when ions and electrons are heated by this field. Blue jets on other hand form when a cosmic ray collides with an air molecule in that region.

Astronomers are eager to see if other planets have lightning because lightning can indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life. Lightning is widely thought of as stirring the primordial soup that led to emergence of life on Earth.

Dubrovin and her fellow researchers re-created the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus in small containers. A circuit that creates strong short-voltage pulses represented the natural lightning sprites. The researchers then analyzed the resulting sprite. The data gathered could help researchers measure how powerful extraterrestrial lightning actually is. The data can also lead to a new understanding of electrical and chemical processes on Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.

Dubrovin believes that the team's research can help the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn to point its cameras in the direction where the lightning sprites can be observed. The research was presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in France.