Singing Comet

[Quoth]

No thread on this?

The European Space Agency's Rosetta space craft landed on a comet. Pretty awesome technical achievement. But there's some weirdness to the story. A singing comet? I wonder how the sensors picked up the noise. Doesn't there need to be some media/atmosphere to transmit the noise/vibration? Unless it was picked up with the probe being in direct contact with the comet surface, I guess. Still, kinda eerie. :)

[Tears of Lys]

I was looking for a thread on it too, if only to congratulate them on this achievement.

But that sound is pretty damn eerie. Are there any technical explanations for it yet?

[polishgenius]

Not being funny like, but did neither of you read the article?

The sounds are thought to be oscillations in the magnetic field around the comet. They were picked up by the Rosetta Plasma Consortium -- a suite of five instruments on the spacecraft that is orbiting the comet.

The Rosetta's Rosetta Plasma Consortium consists of five instruments on the Rosetta orbiter that provide a wide variety of complementary information about the plasma environment surrounding Comet 67P/C-G. Plasma is the fourth state of matter -- an electrically conductive gas that can carry magnetic fields and electrical currents.

Pretty damn cool though.

Shame the actual landing went a little wrong by landing in a shaded dip and thus running out of power, though they did get most of the information they were after and there's a chance that as the comet gets closer to the sun, the lander will be exposed to the sunlight it needs to boot up again.

Other cool, important stuff they've found: organic molecules.

[Tears of Lys]

Not being funny like, but did neither of you read the article?

No. :blush:

[Quoth]

Not being funny like, but did neither of you read the article?

Pretty damn cool though.

Shame the actual landing went a little wrong by landing in a shaded dip and thus running out of power, though they did get most of the information they were after and there's a chance that as the comet gets closer to the sun, the lander will be exposed to the sunlight it needs to boot up again.

Other cool, important stuff they've found: organic molecules.

I did, actually. But, the explanation didn't make a great deal of sense to me. :blush: I knew I shoulda studied science harder in school!

I find it cool that the little mechanical hitchhiker will presumably be winging it's way all the way out to... what... the Oort Cloud and back. Be really cool if this probe, or a future one, could bring back some readings from that far out.

[BookWyrm2]

I did, actually. But, the explanation didn't make a great deal of sense to me. :blush: I knew I shoulda studied science harder in school!

I find it cool that the little mechanical hitchhiker will presumably be winging it's way all the way out to... what... the Oort Cloud and back. Be really cool if this probe, or a future one, could bring back some readings from that far out.

The Sun is basically a big ball of plasma (heated gas with electrons that move freely). Particles of plasma (the solar wind) are constantly smacking into the comet which ionizes pieces of the comet (they get charged by the free flowing electrons of the solar wind).

As neutrally-charged pieces of the comet get ionized they create a change in the magnetic field around the comet (electricity and magnetic fields interact with each other i.e. electromagnetic radiation).

Basically we wouldn't actually be able to hear this singing as it's a magnetic fluctuation created in the electrically-charged atmosphere of the comet - about 10,000 times too low for the human ear to detect... still pretty cool though

I believe NASA has a mission going out to the far solar system next July, the Kuiper Belt though, not sure about the Oort Cloud. It should go by Pluto (the first Plutonian flyby) in July. I'm really pumped - the only images we have of Pluto are pretty bad

[Gillio]

so does this mean that all the comets sing?

Is space really noisy after all?

[Theda Baratheon]

I read the title as 'Singing Contest' and I thought someone was proposing a westeros x-factor type thing.

[BookWyrm2]

so does this mean that all the comets sing?

Is space really noisy after all?

Space is more noisy than often thought. There's a black hole in the Perseus Cluster that emits a never ending belch in the form of a b flat note.

I read the title as 'Singing Contest' and I thought someone was proposing a westeros x-factor type thing.

:lol:

[Quoth]

The Sun is basically a big ball of plasma (heated gas with electrons that move freely). Particles of plasma (the solar wind) are constantly smacking into the comet which ionizes pieces of the comet (they get charged by the free flowing electrons of the solar wind).

As neutrally-charged pieces of the comet get ionized they create a change in the magnetic field around the comet (electricity and magnetic fields interact with each other i.e. electromagnetic radiation).

Basically we wouldn't actually be able to hear this singing as it's a magnetic fluctuation created in the electrically-charged atmosphere of the comet - about 10,000 times too low for the human ear to detect... still pretty cool though

I believe NASA has a mission going out to the far solar system next July, the Kuiper Belt though, not sure about the Oort Cloud. It should go by Pluto (the first Plutonian flyby) in July. I'm really pumped - the only images we have of Pluto are pretty bad

so does this mean that all the comets sing?

Is space really noisy after all?

Ahhh. We've drifted into "If a tree falls in a forest..." territory, I guess. If we can't hear it, is it really "sound". I had a physics teacher, once who argued that it depends entirely upon your definition of "sound". One definition of "Sound" being that which occurs when the "sound" wave encounters an ear drum, which then is carried by neurons to the brain which electronically and chemically (At the time such interpretive process was still under study. For all I know it still is not understood.) interprets the occurance as sound. Thus, if no ear drum, and more importantly no brain, is present to interpret the event as sound, a falling tree (or the "singing" of the comet or "belching" of the Black Hole) doens't really make a "sound".

So, is it really a sound if it's a mechanical interpretation of a magnetic flucuation that's boosted untill it can be heard?

I read the title as 'Singing Contest' and I thought someone was proposing a westeros x-factor type thing.

:lmao:

Does anyone know whether the probe landed on the comet during the comet's outbound trajectory or as it was approaching the sun? I'm guessng the former but can't seem to find that factoid anywhere. Having achieved this feat, I wonder if more such probes are planned with hardware that would continue to transmit data as it (the probe and the comet) reached the outermost point of its orbit.

[Quoth]

The Sun is basically a big ball of plasma (heated gas with electrons that move freely). Particles of plasma (the solar wind) are constantly smacking into the comet which ionizes pieces of the comet (they get charged by the free flowing electrons of the solar wind).

As neutrally-charged pieces of the comet get ionized they create a change in the magnetic field around the comet (electricity and magnetic fields interact with each other i.e. electromagnetic radiation).

Basically we wouldn't actually be able to hear this singing as it's a magnetic fluctuation created in the electrically-charged atmosphere of the comet - about 10,000 times too low for the human ear to detect... still pretty cool though

I believe NASA has a mission going out to the far solar system next July, the Kuiper Belt though, not sure about the Oort Cloud. It should go by Pluto (the first Plutonian flyby) in July. I'm really pumped - the only images we have of Pluto are pretty bad

so does this mean that all the comets sing?

Is space really noisy after all?

Ahhh. We've drifted into "If a tree falls in a forest..." territory, I guess. If we can't hear it, is it really "sound". I had a physics teacher, once who argued that it depends entirely upon your definition of "sound". One definition of "Sound" being that which occurs when the "sound" wave encounters an ear drum, which then is carried by neurons to the brain which electronically and chemically (At the time such interpretive process was still under study. For all I know it still is not understood.) interprets the occurance as sound. Thus, if no ear drum, and more importantly no brain, is present to interpret the event as sound, a falling tree (or the "singing" of the comet or "belching" of the Black Hole) doens't really make a "sound".

So, is it really a sound if it's a mechanical interpretation of a magnetic flucuation that's boosted untill it can be heard?

I read the title as 'Singing Contest' and I thought someone was proposing a westeros x-factor type thing.

:lmao:

Does anyone know whether the probe landed on the comet during the comet's outbound trajectory or as it was approaching the sun? I'm guessng the former but can't seem to find that factoid anywhere. Having achieved this feat, I wonder if more such probes are planned with hardware that would continue to transmit data as it (the probe and the comet) reached the outermost point of its orbit.

[polishgenius]

Does anyone know whether the probe landed on the comet during the comet's outbound trajectory or as it was approaching the sun? I'm guessng the former but can't seem to find that factoid anywhere.

It's the latter. Hence the hope that, even though it shut down for now, it'll reboot as the comet swings around the sun.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Why go to a comet when you can 'hear' the Earth's magnetic field for free?

You can also 'see' radio wave by using a device known as a television.

Sometimes I wish the coolness of the science itself would not be undercut by gimmicks to make it more interesting.

[BookWyrm2]

Ahhh. We've drifted into "If a tree falls in a forest..." territory, I guess. If we can't hear it, is it really "sound". I had a physics teacher, once who argued that it depends entirely upon your definition of "sound". One definition of "Sound" being that which occurs when the "sound" wave encounters an ear drum, which then is carried by neurons to the brain which electronically and chemically (At the time such interpretive process was still under study. For all I know it still is not understood.) interprets the occurance as sound. Thus, if no ear drum, and more importantly no brain, is present to interpret the event as sound, a falling tree (or the "singing" of the comet or "belching" of the Black Hole) doens't really make a "sound".

So, is it really a sound if it's a mechanical interpretation of a magnetic flucuation that's boosted untill it can be heard?

That's more a question of semantics than science. They're both fundamentally interpreting the same sort of information.

The same issue might stand for light: we can't see ultraviolet, radio or infrared but by supplementing our senses with mechanics that validate these phenomena we're able to determine that they exist and that our own eyes and ears aren't receptive with the whole universe.

The phenomena of "sound" is fundamentally oscillation in a medium. If we're not biologically receptive to the sound then it would complicate an already complicated subject to treat it as if it had different properties from the things we do hear. Physics isn't a function of us, to teach it that way would probably lead to more error than not.

Why go to a comet when you can 'hear' the Earth's magnetic field for free?

You can also 'see' radio wave by using a device known as a television.

Sometimes I wish the coolness of the science itself would not be undercut by gimmicks to make it more interesting.

I don't necessarily think the "gimmicks" and the science are incompatible.

Sometimes it's hard to communicate the science without resorting to analogies and often people want to know how something relates to them before they're interested. This can be helpful to pique entry level interest in something like astronomy which is dealing with a lot of stuff that isn't obviously important or relevant to the layperson.

For example: a non-astronomer might not typically care about how stars evolve, but their interest generally rises when they know all the iron in their blood was created in a star and then almost immediately caused it to explode.

I too wish that people in general would be more interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake but as things are, I don't think things should be discredited for being "gimmicky" so long as they're true and generate interest in science