World News for Students of English

16-02-2016 15:00

A light show like no other – this is lightning striking Earth from space. The dazzling footage was captured by British astronaut Tim Peake who tweeted the time-lapse video taken from the International Space Station as they flew from North Africa over Turkey and towards Russia.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (299,338 kilometres per second) meaning lightning is visible when it strikes. It’s normally followed by thunder with the time between the two varying, but if 15 seconds passes before thunder rumbles, then lightning’s around three miles away (4.8 kilometres).

Forty-three-year-old Peak, who’s a former army major, blasted off to the ISS as part of a six-month mission for the European Space Agency in December and recently became the first astronaut representing Britain to carry out a space walk.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard from Tim Peake as he soars around our planet; last night, he tweeted a picture of the waxing moon to his over 400,000 followers.

And for him, this is just another truly out of this world experience.

Difficult words: lightning (the electricity in the sky), strike (to hit), dazzling (extremely impressive), footage (video), thunder (the sound which you hear after a lightning strike), vary (to be different every time), former (-ex), blast off (to take off in a rocket), soar (to move in the sky), waxing (growing, expending in illumination), out of this world (this means two things: the astronaut is not on earth and something that is very exciting and amazing).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com