The Scream Aliens Hear From the Earth

onehitwonder writes "Astronomers have discovered that the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, according to an article up at Space.com. The sounds are created by charged particles from the solar wind colliding with Earth's magnetic field. This article explains more about the sounds and links to an audio recording of it."

Comments

Re:I thought

[Vectronic]

Animals (which includes us, and likely the aliens) can't... machines can, sound travels basically the same "out there" as it does in here, its just there isnt enough particles to produce a wave large enough for our ears to detect...but anyways, assuming that aliens are listening, would generally imply they had the technology to do so, rather than just sticking an ear out.

Re:I thought

[Simian Road]

I'm afraid that's not true. Assuming that a sound wave could travel (particle to particle) in a gas density like that of outer space (1x10^-11 Pa), quantum effects would completely destroy any signal contained years before one particle could collide into the next.

Re:What about the scream we hear from other planet

[LiquidCoooled]

The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.

Its like trying to hear what someone is saying when they are stood next to the speakers at a rock concert and you are on the other side of the stadium.

You would be better getting a video camera with a telephoto lens and trying to lipread :)

Re:I thought

[theheadlessrabbit]

I would imagine that even screaming right next to eachother would probably only make it a few feet before becoming inaudible and dropping down like the "57 octaves below..." I doubt that the sound actually started that low, but who knows...

an octave is a measurement of a signal's frequency, not amplitude. space would not change the pitch of your words, it would render them completely silent.

Re:I thought

[Gospodin]

So let's see. Middle C is about 260 Hz (with Bb slightly lower). 57 octaves lower is 2^-57 * 260 Hz, which is 5.5 x 10^14 seconds per cycle, or about 17.4 million years per cycle. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that humans aren't going to hear this signal.

Re:I thought

[Iron Condor]

to "destroy" it would imply you can destroy information. /pedant

And that's problematic how? There's no law of conservation of information. Information is destroyed all around us all the time. Look up "second law of thermodynamics" one of these days.