Thread: What's your favorite Planet?

Wow dude!!! That's the sound of a million little rocks pissing through space.. cool and creepy.

I think, I'm going to give this thread some stars! At least on the outside - the "Look! Cooool thread stars" I mean.
When I was younger, and quite into esoterics - I heard, that you could take the orbits and frequencies, and then deduce a sound from then, and that would then be spherical sounds, songs or something. I just wanted to check up on this shortly. And yeah - if you want to be a bit over-poetic - they do sing, sort of - here's something, which I guess applies to the sounds of Meskhetyw's video:
Is There Such a Thing as a Planet Sound?

Question: Is There Such a Thing as a Planet Sound?

You can go on eBay right now (NASA has stopped producing copies of the tracks) and buy the original "music" released by NASA depicting the sounds of the planets. How is this possible if sound can't travel through empty space? And how did they capture this "music" anyway?

Answer:
This all started when the Voyager 2 spacecraft swept past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus in the early 90s. The tiny probe picked up electromagnetic disturbances and charged particle fluxes, not actual sound. (This, of course makes sense, because sound waves can't travel through the vacuum of space.)

More specifically, charged particles (either bounding off the planets from the Sun, or produced by the planets themselves) travel in the space around the planets, usually kept in check by their large magnetospheres. Also, radio waves (again either reflected waves, or produced by processes on the planets themselves) can become trapped by the immense strength of a planet's magnetic field.

It is these electromagnetic waves and charged particles that were measured by the probe. The data was then sent back to Earth for analysis.

So How Did These Measurements Become Sound?

While none of the measurements themselves were sound waves, many of the electromagnetic wave and particle oscillation frequencies could be translated into sound. This may sound complicated, but you have devices that you use every day that do exactly the same thing.

You radio, for instance, takes the radio waves (which are simply long wavelength electromagnetic - light - waves) and converts them into sound. You've probably also heard the "buzzing" of electricity. What you are hearing is the charged particles bouncing around and interacting with their surrounds. The pitch of the buzz is related to the vibrational frequency of the particles.

So all NASA had to do was to take these data points accumulated by the Voyager probe and convert them into sound waves.

So Are We Really "Hearing" a Planet Sound?

When you listen to the NASA recordings, you are not hearing directly what a planet would sound like if you were orbiting it. Unfortunately the planets don't sing pretty music when spaceships fly by.

But each planet does have their own unique "song". Since each planet will have different frequencies (because of having different amounts of charged particles flying around and because of the various magnetic field strengths in our solar system) each planet sound will be different.