Life Saver Candy Lights up like Lightning When Smashed

After being smashed by a hammer, life saver lights up just like a lightning strike.
Nursah Ergü

Have you ever realized that when you're eating Wint-O-Green Life Savers, they spark?

This isn't something so shocking since all hard sugar-based candies emit some degree of light when they're breaking, and this effect is called triboluminescence; which is an optical phenomenon in which light is generated through the breaking of chemical bonds in a material.

If a friend would come to you with an idea of crashing a Life Saver, it wouldn't sound so much fun, but it actually lights up like lightning after being smashed. 

Linda M. Sweeting, a chemist at Towson University, explains in a blog post, "It appears that triboluminescence is lightning on a very small scale. When the sugar is cracked, electrical charge is separated, positive from negative, and when there is a big enough charge accumulation (electric field) the electrons jump through the air in the crack, colliding with and exciting the nitrogen molecules as they do."