The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
For a fraction of a second I am five times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Thunder does not accompany me. Thunder is the sound of me.
I hit the Earth roughly a hundred times a second, somewhere.
The rule about never striking twice is simply untrue, and tall buildings prove it daily.
The flash in a storm.
Lightning
The bolt heats the air to around 30,000°C in microseconds. The air explodes outwards, and that explosion, arriving late because sound is slow, is thunder.
A stroke heats the channel to roughly 30,000 degrees Celsius, five times the surface of the Sun, in a few millionths of a second. The air cannot expand fast enough, so it detonates, and the shock wave decaying into sound is thunder — which arrives later only because sound is slow, at about a third of a kilometre per second. Somewhere on Earth this happens around a hundred times a second. The saying about never striking twice is simply false: the Empire State Building is hit around twenty times a year, which is precisely what a lightning rod is for.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #60 · today's mystery · the vault