[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
This is the sound of the aurora on Saturn. Pretty eerie, no?
There is no sound in space. Outside planets and stars, molecules are spread out too thin for sound to propagate. It follows, then, that we can’t really hear sounds planets emit into space. But radio waves—electromagnetic waves with wavelengths longer than infrared light—are, as we know, handy for representing sound. And so it makes sense for us to interpret radio waves, whether originally encoding sound or not, as sound. These are radio waves emitted in conjunction with auroras around Saturn’s poles, similar to the northern and southern lights on Earth. They were picked up by the Cassini spacecraft and then interpreted as sound. But the sound was not in the audible range, so it has been downshifted by a factor of 44. And finally, so as not to bore us to death, it has been speeded up by a factor of 22. Realize, then, that many human choices were made in order for us to be able to “listen to space.” But if you can accept that, you can enjoy this.
Amazing, and creepy as fuck. Astral projection to Saturn anyone? What else shall we find?
I love Tim Kreider
NASA Voyager Recordings - Symphonies of the Planets (I-V)
If you have a taste for ambient/dark ambient, you might be interested in this.
Sample: Jupiter
This is right up my alley, downloading the samples now :O
Halfway to Pluto, New Horizons Wakes Up in ‘Exotic Territory’
Zipping through space at nearly a million miles per day, NASA’s New Horizons probe is halfway to Pluto and just woke up for the first time in months to look around. It’s the perfect opportunity to test New Horizon’s instruments before the probe reaches Pluto in 2015. The 9 weeks of testing commenced on May 25th. Mission controllers plan a thorough checkout and recalibration of all seven science instruments onboard.
On July 14, 2015, the date of closest approach, we’ll be able to distinguish objects on Pluto as small as a football field. Just after New Horizons passes Pluto in 2015, Pluto will appear as a waning crescent to the spacecraft looking back at it. During this phase LORRI, the onboard Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, might be able to spot hazes high in Pluto’s atmosphere or perhaps evidence for cryo-volcanism (i.e., volcanoes that spew icy cold material rather than hot magma) on Pluto’s surface.
As New Horizons passes into Pluto’s shadow in 2015, a UV imaging spectrometer named “Alice” will look back toward the sun through Pluto’s atmosphere. This should reveal how molecules in Pluto’s atmosphere absorb sunlight, and thus what the atmosphere is made of.
Cameras and spectrometers won’t be the only busy instruments. REX, New Horizon’s Radio Science EXperiment, will detect and observe radio signals coming all the way from NASA’s Deep Space Network on Earth. The way those signals bend as they pass through Pluto’s atmosphere will tell us a lot about the atmosphere’s pressure and thickness.
Pluto awaits. The most exciting thing is that we don’t know what we’re going to see when we get there.
Image: Artist concept of hypothetical geysers and sundogs on Pluto.
Source: NASA Science
Jupiter
