Humpday Diversion: Creepy Saturn

By Marcus Gilmer in Miscellaneous on Aug 4, 2010 8:00PM

The above video, purported to play the sounds the rings of the planet Saturn make, came across our inbox this morning. We did a bit more digging and found that this is actually a couple of years old and that it's the planet itself, not just its rings, but it's still damn fascinating if not downright terrifying. A NASA report from 2005 explains:

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Yeah, that's right, we just dropped real science on you, not just another cutesy animal/movie mash-up video!