double flash

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word double flash. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word double flash, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say double flash in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word double flash you have here. The definition of the word double flash will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofdouble flash, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
See also: double-flash

English

Etymology

double +‎ flash

Noun

double flash (plural double flashes)

  1. The characteristic visual phenomenon produced by the atmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon, consisting of a very brief, bright flash of light which dims rapidly, followed by a second, gradually brightening flash.
    • 2010 May, Norman Dombey, “Double Flash”, in London Review of Books (blog), London: LRB Limited:
      On 22 September 1979 at about 1 a.m. GMT, a US Vela satellite passing over the South Atlantic detected a double flash of light in the vicinity of Prince Edward Island.
    • 2015 July, Eileen Patterson, “The Double Flash Meets the Bhangmeter”, in Clay Dillingham, editor, National Security Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory, archived from the original on 1 November 2020, page 12:
      One of the sensors on satellites in the U.S. Nuclear Detonation System uses a relatively simple device to detect the “double flash” of a nuclear detonation anywhere on earth.
    • 2019 September, William Burr, Avner Cohen, Lars-Erik De Geer, Victor Gilinsky, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, with Sokolski, Henry, Weiss, Leonard, and Wright, Christopher, “Blast From the Past”, in Jonathan Tepperman, Ravi Agrawal, Dan Ephron, Cameron Abadi, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Kathryn Salam, Sarah Wildman, James Palmer, Benjamin Soloway, Nina Goldman, editors, Foreign Policy, The Slate Group:
      The detected signal was a “double flash” characteristic of nuclear test signals recorded on 41 previous occasions by Vela satellites.
  2. (engineering) A system using two flash separators to separate phases of a working fluid.

Further reading