A lightning bolt is hotter than the Sun

It's hard to believe, but the air a lightning bolt passes through can reach some 30,000 degrees, almost five times the temperature of the Sun's surface, which is around 5,500.

That brutal heat appears in a fraction of a second, when the enormous electrical discharge crosses the air. The air heats up so violently and so suddenly that it expands all at once, and that explosive expansion is exactly what we hear as thunder.

So lightning doesn't just light things up: for an instant it creates, in the middle of a storm, one of the hottest points on the planet's surface.

Source: NASA