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Eerie Sounds from Saturn

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the woooooooooo-woooooooooooo dept.

Mick Ohrberg writes "Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called 'Saturn kilometric radiation') that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths' Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the University of Iowa, says "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines." It couldn't sound any spookier if they added a Theremin."

2 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Forbidden planet by Various+Assortments · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sounds like some of the effects from the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet!

    http://imdb.com/title/tt0049223/

  2. Saturn in 2001 by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the original version of 2001, they had Saturn instead of Jupiter as the source of the Big Mystery. Clarke thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that Saturn's rings supposedly formed at about the same time the first humans evolved. (Can't verify whether that's accurate, and am dubious as to the meaning of "coincidence" at that time scale.) The extra difficulty of doing SFX with the rings was just a little bit too much, and they changed it to Jupiter. If they'd stuck with Saturn, imagine the silly comments that this discussion would have!