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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Spooky sounds from Saturn

Eerie noises can be heard in audio files made from data collected by the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted links to sound files released over the past several years by the mission team, timed to coincide with Halloween.

Most are not actually sound recordings, but the result of converting non-audio data like magnetic field measurements into sound using computers.

The resulting sounds are quite bizarre. One of them, made from data collected near Saturn's moon Enceladus by the Cassini spacecraft's magnetometer, sounds to my ears like an alien spaceship taking off and landing. In reality, it records fluctuations in the magnetic field around Cassini due to the presence of charged particles.

Two other files (1 and 2) made using radio waves detected in connection with the auroras in Saturn's atmosphere are so weird they're hard for me to describe. But they sound to me vaguely like ray guns going off in cheesy science-fiction movies.

One file was made from actual recordings from a microphone, which was attached to the Huygens lander. It recorded the sound of winds during the probe's descent to the surface of the surprisingly Earth-like moon Titan.

Learn more about the sounds of space in our blog post or in this feature article.

David Shiga, online reporter

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

The sounds of space

The planets and moons of our solar system are a noisy bunch, as we point out in our feature article Sounds in space. It highlights some of the strange creaks and groans, crackles and pops that many scientists would like to record on these worlds by sending spacecraft there equipped with good old-fashioned microphones.

But if you widen the net and include radio emissions converted to sound, astronomers have already recorded all kinds of space cacophonies. Don Gurnett from the University of Iowa has compiled some of his favourites, including the Jovian chorus, radio emissions from electrons zinging around in Jupiter's radiation belts. Sounds like mass panic in the jungle to me.

The European Space Agency also has a space sounds page, where you can "listen" to magnetic field fluctuations on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus (a flying saucer taking off, perhaps?) and the eerie song of wailing Leonids, meteor trails reflecting high-frequency radio waves from transmitters around the world.

My personal favourites are pulsar recordings from Jodrell Bank Observatory. Pulsars are the collapsed cores of stars that blew themselves to smithereens in supernova explosions. The core can collapse into a rotating magnetised ball of neutrons about 15 kilometres wide, which emits radio beams from its poles. If these beams sweep across Earth as the collapsed star rotates, we see regular radio beeps.

The Crab pulsar (pictured) sits in the middle of the beautiful Crab Nebula, the wreckage of a star seen to explode in the year 1054. It rotates 30 times a second. This one is rotating 642 times a second, so fast the beeps have merged seamlessly into a high-pitched whine ? isn't that bizarre?

Hazel Muir, correspondent (Image: Credit: NASA/HST/CXC/ASU/J Hester et al.)

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