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Cassini Captures Audio of Storm On Saturn
Sooner Boomer writes "The Cassini space probe has been monitoring an enormous storm on Saturn since it was detected last December. The storm, dubbed 'The Great White Spot', now 500 times larger than any previously seen by Cassini at Saturn, is 8 times the surface area of Earth. Observers on Earth have been able to see a bright white 'smudge' in the northern half of the planet."
NASA released a recording of the electrical noise generated by the lightning.
When the earth next orbits past Saturn, will the storm cause any damage? I bet the Saturn wind blowing across the sea would cause big waves, maybe even a tsunami, are we even prepared for this?
Cassini didn't capture audio of the storm. It captured essentially electrical noise which would be like turning an AM radio on during a thunder storm. The summary and webpage are a little misleading in this regard--it's not as though a microphone on a balloon was dropped into the atmosphere.
This sounds like playing a 12" vinyl album at 33 1/3 when there's all kinds of dust and scratches on the record. I guess I kind of hoped it would sound...well....interesting in some way.
Yes, there is a definite, strong likelyhood that the storm on Saturn will blow across the sea and cause big waves, and tsunamis are a possibility. We are also totally unprepared for this. I scared.
It took a couple thousand NASA scientists, a couple billion dollars... but now we know. Yes, it blends.
We've all been conditioned by movies to think otherwise, but sound travel by vibrations and needs a medium to propagate, gas, liquid, or solid. There are no sounds in space, because there is nothing to support it.
True, but you could fire a laser into the atmosphere and record fluctuations in the returning beam.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I will personally see to it that when Cassinni lands on Saturn next week that it picks up some rocks just for you. We just need to make sure it doesn't land anywhere near the storm though, or it might get blown over and the drawer where all the experiments are kept will open and they will fall out.
Finally! It took a while but now I can change my ambient bakcground music at home from whale singing to static stomach cramp noises! It is even better than those tree hugging hippie crap rain forest cds! I haven't heard such a nice sound since my old AM radio died a decade ago... I wonder if it will make it to Hit #1 though?!
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
Oh, so roughly the same size as a Minecraft world then.
There are no sounds in space, because there is nothing to support it.
That's not entirely true. More accurately, there's just *very little* sound in space. Also, you would definitely hear it if a large spacecraft full of gas exploded next to you, even in a perfect vacuum. All that gas and energy is going to expand outwards in a significant pressure wave. Sure, it will die out much faster then it would on Earth, but it certainly is not going to be silent to an appropriately positioned observer.
Lasers going pew pew in space, now THAT is ridiculous =p
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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We've all been conditioned by movies to think otherwise, but sound travel by vibrations and needs a medium to propagate, gas, liquid, or solid. There are no sounds in space, because there is nothing to support it.
The sound just propagates through waves in the aether...
The real mystery is how NASA managed to compress the 93Kb wave file into a 120Kb MP3 file. Solving that might explain some of their budgetary issues.
Your technointerpretive presentations of simufactual infotainment never fails to edutroll me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
not as noisy as the dark brown storm on Uranus
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"Noise" in this case does not refer to sound, but presumably to perturbations in the normal electro(-magnetic?) emissions that are detected emanating from Saturn.
Unfortunately, they used the word "Audio" in TFS and TFH. "Audio" can only be used as far as I am aware to refer to sound.
People have been listening to this on our planet for sometime. Atmospherics or 'sferics' for short are generated by lighting and are actually very wide band in coverage. Yes they can be heard on shortwave radios as a crackle and loud crash but the one I listen with is custom made for this purpose (BBB-4 VLF receiver). They can be quite interesting to listen to as lighting produces some interesting sounds when cut off in frequency; whistlers, Chorus and tweeks for example. Other interesting sounds can be heard from Auroras when their is a geomagnetic storm expected.
I used to study VLF waves produced by lightning on earth, and we would often play signals out through speakers to help us understand their nature. This is the reason that whistlers are called whistlers, and not something lame like "dynamic frequency lightning produced electromagnetic waves"
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
... the atmosphere is blowing by some sort of fixed object below the cloud tops. The linked photo sure looks like eddies in a current rather than a rotating storm.
Have gnu, will travel.
But when things explode, that gas expanding and blowing past your ship might make some noise?