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

Awful, ear-piercing reporting

[geomobile]

The usefulness of this discovery in finding planets or identifying if they have an atmosphere is interesting.

It as interesting as the lengths they went to create a sensationalist headline ...any emission in any spectrum can be mapped to audible sound, I guess. Unless it carries information encoded in analog form meant to be replayed as sound, it will always sound like awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles.

News pattern:

1. Find interesting scientific discovery that features emissions in any spectrum.
2. Map emission to audible sound.
3. Write "The screams X emits to anybody listening"
4. Profit.

Wait, no ??? line. I must have told it wrong.

What about the scream we hear from other planet ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't another planet emit those noises ?
I suppose the answer is "Yes", if it has a magnetic field and if it orbits a usual star.
So, can't we use those noises to detect extrasolar planets ?

Re:I thought

[MrNaz]

Sound is the propagation of a wave within a medium, and in space, there is no medium with the density required to propagate a wave of any kind. Sound can travel within a medium such as a gas, however when the gas density decreases such as an atmosphere does as you get further from the surface, the sound wave attenuates, eventually petering out to nothing.

When the article says that the Earth "screams" and "whistles", it's not talking about acoustic sound waves, rather, the acoustic translation of the radio waves that are given off as a result of the helio-terrestrial effects. Whatever sensory capacity aliens have may not actually consider it to be noise, to them, it may sound pleasant, the way the waves on a beach sound to us. They may be translating it into their native sensory package, which may be "eyes" that are only sensitive to microwaves, or "ears" that only "hear" sound in a band outside of our 5hz-15khz range. Once translated, we have no idea how they'd perceive the resulting sensory experience to be. It could be a piercing shriek to them, or a gentle soothing experience.