Question

Hela Lightning

During Ragnar¨ok, Thor unleashed the biggest lightning strike in the history of lightning against his foe Hela. I don’t know if anybody was around with a multimeter, but let’s just round up Earth’s biggest lightning strikes and estimate this peaked at 1 MA of current flowing through a 100 MV potential difference.

a) How much power was unleashed? (For comparison, humanity in total uses an average of about 2 TW of power.)

b) Although the strike itself lasted longer, the peak during which most of the charge and energy is released probably lasted around 0.1 ms. How much energy was in the strike?

c) How many electrons went through Hela?

d) These electrons were probably traveling in the neighborhood of 108 m/s . With how much force did the lightning strike Hela? (Ignore relativity.)

e) Since Asgardians float in water, we must infer Hela’s mass is close to a human’s of the same size; let’s round to 50 kg. How much would the force from part (d) accelerate Hela if it were unopposed? (In addition to SI, please also provide the answer in g’s, i.e., as a multiple of g ≈ 10 m/S^2 .)

Answer 1