NASA Harnesses Music From Stars And Planets: Here’s What It Sounds Like [Listen]

Credit: NASA
Credit: NASA

Scientists are rarely seen as artists, but that’s exactly what NASA scientists became when they discovered that they could measure a number of sounds being bounced around and within planets and stars.

The sound is produced in the same way that a musical tone is created within an organ pipe. Sound can resonate within a star by measuring the turbulence occurring on the star’s surface.

The vibrations that are created from the turbulence penetrate the star’s interior and set up resonant oscillations at frequencies that are dependent on the size of the star, its density, and the rotation.

Study the infographic below to better grasp how this “celestial music” is created.

Credit: EWAO
Credit: EWAO

NASA explains that the sounds are formed from a number of activities that transpire in space. EWAO outlines some of these activities in the following excerpt:

“A multitude of heavenly bodies, interactions, and forces in the realm of space make music such as the electromagnetic pulses given off by the planets, their rings, and their moons, radio waves that bounce between a planet and the invisible borders of its atmosphere, the interaction of charged particles within planetary atmospheres, emissions of charged particles from the rings that circle some planets, and even solar winds.”

Not only did America’s national space organization discover these sounds, they developed a special instrumentation program to translate the vibrations into real sound to create the music.

Listen to the sounds produced by Saturn’s rings, Miranda, Neptune, Voice of Earth, Saturn, Jupiter, IO, Rings of Uranus, Song of Earth, and Uranus in the following video.

What do you think of these “songs”? Please comment on, like, and share this article!


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