The electricity produced by a Van de Graaff generator is called static electricity because the amounts of positive and negative charge are not perfectly balanced. Static electricity is created when electrons and protons are separated by a large distance. It was the first kind of electricity discovered. Static electricity is high voltage electricity with a low current. An electric current is a flow of electric charge.
Current electricity has a lower voltage and a higher current than static electricity.
In electrostatics, electrical fields are very important as opposed to magnetic fields. Lightning is a form of static electricity. A gold leaf electroscope is one of the simplest and most useful tools used in electrostatics. It is used to detect electrical charges. Physicists who study atoms and the subatomic particles that form them can investigate the structure of matter by splitting atoms apart and studying the particles that stream away from them.