'Gigantic Jet' Lighting: Ionsphere Discharges Electricity in Thunderstorm (VIDEO)

Look. In the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. No. It's a rare glimpse of a "gigantic jet" - a huge and mysterious burst that connects a thunderstorm with the upper atmosphere - and was made over China in 2010 and recently described by scientists, according to Yahoo! News.

The gigantic jet took place in eastern China on Aug. 12, 2010 - the farthest a ground-based one has ever been observed from the equator, according to the research team.

While previous jets of this kind were mainly seen in tropical or subtropical regions, this one took place at approximately 35 degrees latitude, or about the same as the southern part of Tennessee in the United States.

"This is the first report from mainland China," lead researcher Jing Yang, an atmospheric scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told OurAmazingPlanet. 

As the gigantic jet peaked at around 55 miles above the ground, researchers were able to get a good look at the storm using a variety of tools, including Doppler radar data and weather pictures in the infrared band of radiation.

Yang added that her team had possibly seen another gigantic jet in the same area during a different thunderstorm, but said they needed to recheck the data to confirm.

"It's not as clear as this one if it is a gigantic jet or not," she said.

It wasn't until the last century that electrical activity above thunderclouds was scientifically proven.

These electrical discharges can take several forms, such as sprites (orange-red flashes) and blue jets, which appear as blue cones.

While scientists are still trying to understand how these gigantic jets work, they believe the jets balance out the electrical charge during thunderstorms by discharging the ionosphere - a part of the upper atmosphere filled with charged particles.

The results of the study were recently published in the Chinese Science Bulletin. 

Want to find out more about the lightning? Check out this video, courtesy of YouTube.