If a comet hurls through space and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?
As you probably heard by now, The European Space Agency, ESA succeeded in its Rosetta Mission and touched down its robotic lander Philae, on Comet 67P which is 300 million miles from Earth and traveling at a velocity of more than 34,000 miles per hour. The probe was launched in March, 2004 and took a little over 10 years to reach the comet.
Philae landed on its side and is currently stuck in a shadowy area where it’s not getting enough sunlight to recharge its solar cells. Philae seems to be hanging on by a thread now but it’s nevertheless a huge moment in space history. The lander has captured never before seen images and data that will hopefully give us more outer space insight.
Listen to the sonification released by ESA of what comet 67P would sound like if you could hear sound in space.
Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium [RPC] has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording by a factor of about 10,000.
P.S. If you need a reminder of just how big our solar system is, be sure to see this.
Update: November 15, 2014
Philae Comet Lander Falls Silent as Batteries Run Out
image: esa/rosetta/philae/civa
