VERIFIED FACT
A pistol shrimp snap can create a bubble that briefly flashes with sun-hot temperatures.
Why this sounds fake
A small claw underwater should make a snap, not a collapsing bubble with a burst of light.
A tiny shrimp claw does not sound like a heat-and-light machine. The pistol shrimp snaps so fast that it shoots a water jet and forms a cavitation bubble. When that bubble collapses, it emits a very brief flash of light. Researchers reporting the phenomenon in Nature estimated conditions inside the collapsing bubble reached at least 5,000 kelvin. That is not the ocean becoming hot like the Sun, and the flash is extremely short-lived. The strange part is that the physical collapse of a bubble, made by a small animal's claw, can create light at all.
The Surprise
The light and heat come from the collapsing cavitation bubble, not the claw itself.
1 discovery explored
