Here's a hot one. When lightning flashes, it heats the air it passes through to about 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about five times hotter than the surface of the sun! And it all happens in a fraction of a second.
So what does air do when it gets that hot, that fast? It explodes outward! The heated air expands so quickly that it squishes the air all around it. That makes a shockwave. Then the air cools and shrinks back down fast. That big burst of air is what makes the thunder you hear. So every rumble is really the sound of super hot air pushing outward.
Lightning's heat is so strong that when it hits a tree, it can turn the water inside into steam in an instant. Sometimes that even blows a strip of bark right off the tree!
And lightning is busy. About 45 lightning flashes happen somewhere on Earth every second. Only about one-third of them reach the ground. The rest are flashes up in the clouds.
