Chorus waves tagged posts

Scientists have detected cosmic waves that sound like birds chirping in an unexpected place.

These bursts of plasma, called chorus waves, ripple at the same frequency as human hearing. When converted to audio signals, their sharp notes mimic high-pitched bird calls.

Researchers have captured such sounds in space before, but now they have sensed the chirping waves from much farther away: over 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth, where they’ve never been measured before.

“That opens up a lot of new questions about the physics that could be possible in this area,” said Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the Unive...

Strong whistler mode waves observed in the vicinity of Jupiter’s moons. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05431-x

Chorus waves are electromagnetic waves. Converted to sound they sound like singing and chirping birds at dawn. They can cause polar lights above the Earth as well as damage to satellites. Now, a team of researchers has found that such waves are intensified million-fold around Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. This study provides important observational constraints for theoretical studies.

These are the new results from a systematic study on Jupiter’s wave environment taken from the Galileo Probe spacecraft...