Are perytons signatures of ball lightning?

TL;DR

This paper explores the hypothesis that peryton signals detected by radio telescopes may originate from atmospheric phenomena known as ball lightning, proposing testable predictions to confirm or refute this connection.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that ball lightning could produce radio signals similar to perytons and suggests new observational approaches to test this hypothesis.

Findings

Perytons' signatures are consistent with emissions from nonstationary radiofrequency cavities in ball lightning.

Existing detection procedures may be missing events related to perytons due to filtering.

Proposes testable predictions to establish or disprove the link between perytons and ball lightning.

Abstract

The enigmatic downchirped signals, called "perytons", that are detected by radio telescopes in the GHz frequency range may be produced by an atmospheric phenomenon known as ball lightning (BL). If BLs act as nonstationary radiofrequency cavities, their characteristic emission frequencies and evolution time scales are consistent with peryton observations, and so are general patterns in which BLs are known to occur. Based on this evidence, testable predictions are made that can confirm or rule out a causal connection between perytons and BLs. In either case, how perytons are searched for in observational data may warrant reconsideration, for existing procedures may be discarding events that has the same nature as known perytons.