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USA TODAY Fact check: Lightning shooting into space from Earth is real, but image is a simulation Miriam Fauzia, USA TODAY 2 hrs ago Some patient, employee information accessed in N.L. cyberattack, government… Texas high school principal and district agree to part ways after he was accused… Play Video Jeff Bezos pledges $2bn to combat climate change Click to expand The claim: Lightning shot up into space near Nauru Island Monday evening thunder storms moving in from the west brought an incredible lightning show to the Space Coast. A single 20 second exposure captured numerous bolts over the Thousand Islands in Cocoa Beach.© MALCOLM DENEMARK/FLORIDA TODAY Monday evening thunder storms moving in from the west brought an incredible lightning show to the Space Coast. A single 20 second exposure captured numerous bolts over the Thousand Islands in Cocoa Beach. The crackling streaks of electricity let out during thunderstorms typically appear to travel downward, striking the ground. But can lightning travel in the reverse, upward into space? One graphic circulating on social media claims it can and has a picture to purportedly prove it. "In some cases lightning can go upward into space," reads a graphic shared in the Feb. 19 Instagram post, which gained recent attention. Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. Above the text, an image depicts the purported phenomenon: A jet of bright blue light shoots above Earth into space, apparently as seen from the planet's orbit. The post claims this was observed near the "island of Naru (sic) in the Pacific Ocean." The Instagram post amassed nearly 4,000 interactions in about nine months, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool. Fact check: Times Square billboard altered to falsely claim Trump won 2020 election Lightning can actually travel upward into our planet's atmosphere, however, the image in the Instagram post is an artistic simulation of the phenomenon, not an actual image taken from space. USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram poster for comment. Lightning observed in 2019 As the post claims, blue jets were spotted shooting out of a thunderstorm near Nauru, a small island in the central Pacific Ocean, by researchers abroad the International Space Station in February 2019, Live Science reported. In an article published in the journal Nature in January, the scientists described the event as five intense flashes of blue light, each lasting between 10 to 20 milliseconds. The event ended with a blue jet reaching altitudes up to about 32 miles above sea level in less than a second, slightly above Earth's second atmospheric level, called the stratosphere. On Jan. 20, the European Space Agency released an artist's impression of the phenomenon in a 20-second video. The image in the Instagram post can be seen briefly around the five-second mark. Blue jets have been observed from the ground and aircraft for years, but exactly how far they can travel upward has not previously been recorded, reported Science News. And it's not entirely clear what causes the upward lightning. The working theory is that, similar to normal lightning caused by an electrical imbalance between nearby clouds or a cloud and the ground, the blue jet lightning is provoked when a positively charged section of cloud interacts with a negatively charged layer sitting above it, reported Smithsonian Magazine. This sort of upper atmospheric lightning is part of a group of events classified as transient luminous events that occur within the upper regions of Earth's atmosphere and were first spotted by accident in 1989. Our rating: Missing context Based on our research, we rate MISSING CONTEXT the claim lightning shot up into space near Nauru Island. While the phenomenon is real and was spotted above the area near the island, the image included in the post is a screenshot of a video simulation, not an actual image taken from space. Our fact-check sources: Live Science, Jan. 22, Upward-shooting 'blue jet' lightning spotted from International Space Station Nature, Jan. 20, Observation of the onset of a blue jet into the stratosphere The European Space Agency, Jan. 20, Elves seen from space Science News, Jan. 21, Space station detectors found the source of weird 'blue jet' lightning Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 26, Mysterious Blue Jet Lightning Seen From Space BBC, Jan. 26, Nasa: Blue jet space lightning spotted by scientists from the ISS Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook. Slide 1 of 11: Waste pulled from the Pacific Ocean is shown being loaded on to the deck of a boat. The Ocean Cleanup extracted more than 63,000 pounds of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a 12-week cleaning phase ending in October 2021. Next Slide Auto Rotation On Full Screen 1/11 SLIDES © Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup Waste pulled from the Pacific Ocean is shown being loaded on to the deck of a boat. The Ocean Cleanup extracted more than 63,000 pounds of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a 12-week cleaning phase ending in October 2021. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Lightning shooting into space from Earth is real, but image is a simulation