Interesting fact: A lightning bolt can heat the surrounding air to temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun for a fraction of a second.
The answer: Lightning is not a solid object with ordinary weight, but its energy has a tiny mass equivalent. A 1 billion joule lightning discharge corresponds to about 1.1 x 10^-8 kilograms, or only a few micrograms.
Lightning is hard to weigh because it is an electrical discharge, not a chunk of matter. Scientists measure current, voltage, temperature, and energy instead. Understanding lightning's effective mass through energy equivalence is more of a physics insight than a practical scale measurement, but it helps explain how intensely energetic lightning really is despite being so brief.
