7/8 Thunder and Lightning FUN FUN FUN

What better way to learn about thunder and lightning than MAKING thunder and lightning!  We made thunder poppers to demonstrate the force of air causing loud vibrations.   KH won our contest as the loudest popper!  Way to go!  We also practiced transferring electrons and causing reactions between a negatively charged object (person on slide) and a positively charged object (person on ground) to create a tiny SPARK of lightning.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

What is Thunder?

Thunder is the sound that lightning makes. Sounds simple but why does lightning make a sound. Any sound you hear is made up of vibrations, the vibrations travel through the air as waves until they reach your ear.
This means lightning must cause some vibrations.
Lightning is a huge discharge of electricity. When lightning strikes huge amounts of electricity shoots through the air, this causes two things to happen.
1. The electricity hits the air and starts it vibrating, anything vibrating causes a sound.
2.The lightning is also very hot and heats up the air around it. Hot air gets bigger: it expands. As lightning is very hot the air gets bigger very quickly and pushes against the air particles starting another vibration.
These vibrations are what you are hearing when you hear thunder, the rumbling of thunder is caused by the vibration or sound bouncing of the ground and the clouds.

Why is thunder not at the same time as the lightning?

We SEE the lightning before we HEAR the thunder because light travels faster than sound.
The light from the lightning travels to our eyes much quicker than the sound from the lightning so we hear it later than we see it.

Source:  http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/page86g.html