These shoot up or down from the sky and leave a trail of smoke. Are these meteors?
Those are contrails caused by aircraft. Contrails come from one of two sources- either water vapor in the jet engine’s exhaust (one of the products of combusting hyrdocarbons is water,) condensing into a stream of mini clouds.
The other source is caused by the flow of air over the surfaces of the plane. typically over the aerodynamic surfaces (though in the YF-23, it could have been caused by that valley between the engines,) What’s happening here is there’s water vapor in the humid air, and the dewpoint is such that, as the air flows around the wing- the air pressure changes, and if that pressure change is enough, it’ll cause the humid air to momentarily drop below the dew point creating a stream of cloud.
If, any points to a contrail and says ‘AH CHEM TRAIL’ feel free to laugh at them. it’s just water vapor that’s been condensed into suspended water droplets.
(Re-Commenting, since my original comment got yeeted into the nether… sorry, this is in exact but it should at least have all the same information for posterity)
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 7 months ago
SpeedLimit55@lemmy.world 7 months ago
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 7 months ago
…that didn’t take long…
Chemtrails are not real.
while cloud seeding is a thing, this is not what the conspiracy theorists are pointing at as ‘chemtrails’. you can know that because cloud seeding kind of requires clouds to function. which, would obscure any smoke trails left by the silver iodide. cloud seeding takes already-condensed-out water vapor (aka, clouds,) and gives it something to attach to in large enough quantities that the droplets fall out of suspension- that is to say, they, uh, precipitate… and… uh… become precipitation… (aka, rain. or hail.)
this is done for a variety of purposes. the first is to cause clouds to precipitate in specific areas (I.E. LA does this over the San Bernardino Valley, to cause the precipitation to help with their hydro electric plants. And California does it up in the mountains to generate snow pack.)
Then there’s the opposite- for example, around airports, they’ll seed fog banks to get rid of the fog. or, in a bit more of a vane example, they seeded clouds to prevent it from raining on the Beijing Olympic’s opening ceremony.
SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Contrails are weather vapor
Cloud seeding is something different and usually involves injecting small particulates for water droplets to nucleate on.
Where chemtrails are usually a reference to a particular chemical introduced to disperse into the air (not nucleate with). Often as part of a conspiracy saying all aircraft are taking part in blanketing the skies with whatever chemical agent is the flavor of the week. I’ve heard people say it’s mixed into the fuels, etc.
However, there are very rare instances where a plane will actually release chemicals via fuel into the air. When a plane has to make an emergency landing (especially right after takeoff) they may actually dump fuel in order to reduce weight and to minimize the explosive/fire hazard from the fuel.
Chickenstalker@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Meds, now!
Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You are technically correct but only if you are loose with how you define chemtrails.
burntbutterbiscuits@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. He’s not wrong. We really do use chemicals to try and get it to rain more.