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that the discovery is important. It's an important reminder that lightning can strike far from a storm cell where it would initially be a generator. So that gives them an interesting thought there that you know 550 miles away you're standing out here in your backyard and you're mapped by a lightning bolt. But the lightning that is within 5 kilometers, 6.2 miles, that's indicated with reliable lightning data, a person actually at that point should go to a lightning-safe building or a vehicle. Extreme chases show lightning can arrive within a second over a long distance. But these huge lightning bolts are actually traveling through the clouds. They're ground flashes and they're traveling through the clouds so they can eventually become a ground strike. So there's a lightning bolt. It went across five states. It was recorded for the longest lightning bolt ever recorded and this is from the World Meteorological Organization and they confirmed it. And the Omega flash traveled across 550 miles, 829 kilometers. It was from eastern Texas through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas to near Kansas City. It was in Missouri in seven seconds and being the previous record 477 miles, 768 kilometers. And the flash happened on October 22, 2017 but it was too long to be fully measured by ground-based sensors at that time. And as an estimate, you get data from a geostationary satellite. And finally, there's a document that the NASA said that the researchers published the findings July 31 in the Bolson of America, the biological society. This is repeater station. And they're supposed to have a slightly greater extreme through these flashes. Exactly how lightning gets its additional spark is still contested. We were talking about that earlier. Sometimes the same thing and now we know. But it's been highly contested up until now. But regardless how it started, it just shows how far these things could travel. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology