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When a NASA spacecraft made its first full orbit around Jupiter, a University of Iowa instrument on board recorded haunting sounds befitting the Halloween season.
The UI instrument was listening to Jupiter's auroras, light shows similar to the northern and southern lights on Earth but on a vastly larger scale. The radio emissions cast by Jupiter's auroras were recorded by the UI instrument, called Waves, as the Juno spacecraft traveled about 2,600 miles above Jupiter's swirling clouds. Those emission recordings were then converted into sound files by UI engineers.
The emissions from Jupiter were discovered in the 1950s but had never been analyzed from such a close vantage point, according to NASA.
"Jupiter is talking to us in a way only gas-giant worlds can," says Bill Kurth, research scientist at the UI and co-investigator for Waves. "Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras that encircle Jupiter's north pole. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons that are generating them come from."
You can hear the audio result here. Sounds like an alien monster from the Star Trek, the Original Series.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fubari on Saturday October 15 2016, @05:25AM
Sonification [wikipedia.org] is a thing.
Scientists use it to convert data to audio to give them another perspective... kind of like visualization of data, but using sound. From wikipedia:
I liked earlier conversions of the LIGO (please tell me you know what LIGO is and why it is important) event to audio (almost koan-like to ask What is the sound of two black holes colliding? [soundsofspacetime.org] And the LIGO merger event [youtube.com].
r.e. arbitrary:
Not so arbitrary, they scaled it. The relative changes in frequency and amplitude are still there.
I'm impressed actually, the radio waves span 13 hours and the compressed it to 25 seconds (0:27 to 0:52 in the video). Damn, 13 hours is... 46,800 seconds. So time-compressed by about a factor of 2,000 (actually 1,872 if you care about precision).
The phsyics and math involved are pretty cool.
The spectrograph and (heatmap of intensity by frequency) is super cool and suggests interesting patterns things to analyze.
I would expect the researchers are using various transforms and scale factors.
The "25 second" thing probably works well for a publicity sound-bite, so to speak.
Trying to think about the data and understand it as-is (all 13 hours of it) seems like it would be pretty hard to notice patterns.