The cause of this rare meteorological phenomenon has remained unexplained for centuries

A 'floating ball of fire' has been spotted during a thunderstorm outside an Essex care home.

The strange meteorological phenomenon, known as ball lightning, was reported by residents in a Great Wakering care home during last Friday's thunderstorms (August 10).

Ball lightning is usually associated with thunderstorms but lasts considerably longer than a normal lightning bolt.

Tom Defty, forecaster at the Essex Weather Centre, explained how this was only the third report of ball lightning he has come across during 20 years on the job.

"Residents at this care home reported that an orb of fire was floating in the gardens of the home," he said.

This summer, something strange has been happening in the mesosphere. The mesosphere is a layer of the atmosphere so high that it almost touches space. In the rarefied air 83 km above Earth's surface, summertime wisps of water vapor wrap themselves around specks of meteor smoke. The resulting swarms of ice crystals form noctilucent clouds (NLCs), which can be seen glowing in the night sky at high latitudes.

And, no, that's not the strange thing.

Northern sky watchers have grown accustomed to seeing these clouds in recent years. They form in May, intensify in June, and ultimately fade in July and August. This year, however, something different happened. Instead of fading in late July, the clouds exploded with unusual luminosity. Kairo Kiitsak observed this outburst on July 26th from Simuna, Estonia:

"It was a mind-blowing display," says Kiitsak. "The clouds were visible for much of the night, rippling brightly for at least 3 hours."

Other observers saw similar displays in July and then, in August, the clouds persisted. During the first half of August 2018, reports of NLCs to Spaceweather.com have tripled compared to the same period in 2017. The clouds refuse to go away.

Researchers at the University of Colorado may have figured out why. "There has been an unexpected surge of water vapor in the mesosphere," says Lynn Harvey of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). This plot, which Harvey prepared using data from NASA's satellite-based Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument, shows that the days of late July and August 2018 have been the wettest in the mesosphere for the past 11 years:

Magnetic fields are common in space yet their origin is poorly understood. In stars, they generate spots and flares; in planets, they can create amazing auroral displays. Now, a team of astronomers has detected surprisingly strong magnetic fields in multiple brown dwarfs, failed stars that are too big to be planets but too small to ignite hydrogen fusion in their cores. The detections carried an even bigger surprise: unexpected auroral activity on a "rogue planet" that wanders the cosmos alone.

Melodie Kao (Arizona State University) and colleagues used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to detect high-frequency radio emissions from four nearby brown dwarfs, with masses between 12 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter. Their magnetic fields are hundreds to thousands of times stronger than those around the Sun and power brilliant, radio-emitting aurorae similar to the Northern Lights on Earth. The results appear in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (free preprint).

Among the brown dwarfs under study is SIMP0136, an object with a mass just below 13 times the mass of Jupiter - just below the dividing line that separates planets from brown dwarfs. Floating in interstellar space 20 light-years away, this planet is isolated - a "rogue planet."

On Earth, brilliant aurorae appear around the North and South Poles, where charged particles from the Sun stream in along Earth's magnetic field and crash into the upper atmosphere. A similar mechanism works at Jupiter, where the particles come from Jupiter's moons rather than the Sun. But unlike Earth and Jupiter, SIMP0136 is on its own - it either formed by itself or was flung out of another solar system. Either way, it doesn't have a parent star, so its aurorae can't come from interactions with a stellar wind.

Perhaps the planet hosts a moon of its own - but it's too soon to come to that conclusion. More observations are needed to confirm the origin of the radio emissions.

Ominous wave-like clouds have been spotted over an American town, prompting cheeky users to make doomsday predictions and references to Steven King's and George R. R. Martin's works.

In a video posted online, a giant tsunami-shaped cloud structure is seen "rolling" onto the small town of Anna in southern Illinois.

On St. Patrick's Day in 2015, people living as far south as Tennessee spotted brilliant green and red auroras glowing in the night skies. The northern lights-which are typically visible only at high latitudes-were caused by a space storm so intense it disrupted electrical fields on Earth's surface. Now, a new study helps to explain how space storms produce powerful, ground-level electric currents that disrupt power grids, gas and oil pipelines, and communication systems.

Scientists have long known that these currents, called geomagnetically induced currents (GICs), result from interactions between the fluctuating solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere, a region around the upper atmosphere dominated by the magnetic field that buffers our planet from space radiation. The ionosphere, a pulsating layer of charged particles that produces auroras, also plays an important role. Precisely how the storms produce the on-the-ground electric currents has been difficult to pinpoint, however.

Do you notice anything unusual about our sky today? If you look closely, you'll see a slight orange haze above Southwest Florida over the next few days.

This haze was very evident around sunrise Wednesday morning looking east. The image below was taken around 7 a.m. from downtown Fort Myers.

The source of this orange haze is a layer of dry dusty air originating from the Sahara Desert that's traveled over 6 thousand miles from Africa to South Florida!

Firefighters in Derbyshire have captured on video a rare fire tornado, or firenado, towering 50ft above them while they tackled an industrial blaze near the town of Swadlincote.

The film shows a dazzling column of red-hot fire reaching high into the sky as black smoke billows up from a pool of flames at a plastic pallet factory, where the blaze broke out at about 1.20am on Tuesday morning.

As the camera tilts back to show the full height of the phenomenon, the whirling string of light appears to pulsate and bend as it is whipped by winds.

Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service, which helped the Derbyshire and Staffordshire services tackle the blaze, shared the video on Facebook, saying: "Whilst we were firefighting at Occupation Lane we witnessed a firenado or a fire whirl.

"It's created as cool air enters the top of the hot air causing a swirl similar to how a tornado is formed."

A glowing shower of meteorites is set to light up the night skies this August as hundreds of burning space rocks wipe out in Earth's atmosphere, much to the delight of stargazers across the globe.

The Perseids is a prolific shower of fiery space particles that has streaked over our planet annually for generations as Earth encounters debris falling off the Swift-Tuttle comet, which was first discovered back in 1862.

The gleaming debris is generally first seen in mid-July in the northern hemisphere but enters a particularly sweet period of viewing for amateur stargazers between August 11-13, 2018. According to NASA, the peak period happens around a moonless night when the sky is darker than normal.

"Unlike most meteor showers, which have a short peak of high meteor rates, the Perseids have a very broad peak, as Earth takes more than three weeks to plow through the wide trail of cometary dust," said Jane Houston Jones, of the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A new radio telescope has picked up milliseconds-long radio bursts originating in a mysterious source from across the universe. Exploding stars and black holes, as well as alien civilizations, have been cited as possible explanations.

The CHIME (which stands for the Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) telescope, located in British Columbia, could pick up the first-ever "fast radio bursts" (FRB) at frequencies below 700 MHz, according to a report by Patrick Boyle from McGill University on Astronomer's Telegram, which space researchers use to share the information about new discoveries. The signal, named FRB 180725A, was detected on July 25th and lasted milliseconds.

Besides this signal at 580 MHz, the scientists also detected several weaker signals, at frequencies as low as 400 MHz. They were registered in the day as well as at night. Although the results are said to be preliminary, the astronomers still posted them on-line to encourage fellow scientists to "to search for repeated bursts at all wavelengths."

Usually, August 1st is the beginning of the end for noctilucent clouds in the northern hemisphere. Weather conditions at the top of Earth's atmosphere shift in August, making it more difficult for summertime wisps of water vapor to crystallize around specks of meteor smoke. As August begins in 2018, however, noctilucent clouds are still going strong. Just this morning, Vesa Vauhkonen photographed a bright display over Rautalampi, Finland:

"Night-shining clouds over the lake of Konnevesi were very beautiful--the best ones I've seen in many years," says Vauhkonen.

A similar display appeared over the Talkeetna Mountains of Alaska. "They were the best noctilucent clouds I've ever seen, extremely bright," says eyewitness Tempy Larew.