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You may have heard about the music of the spheres, but NASA has discovered the songs of the moons. Using the data returned by the Cbadini unmanned spacecraft during its Grand Final, space scientists captured the dynamic interaction of plasma waves moving between Saturn and its moon Enceladus and transformed them into a haunting cosmic soundtrack. beautiful planet with its distinct set of rings, it is also a giant electric generator. Discovered for the first time by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979, the planetary magnetic field around Saturn is the second largest in size and intensity than Jupiter's. It extends 20 to hundreds of times the radius of Saturn and is filled with ionized plasma that flows between the planet and its moons.
The main source of this plasma is the Enceladus moon, which ejects a tonne of water per second from the geysers located near its south pole. In addition, as Enceladus revolves around Saturn, it acts as the frame of a dynamo, cutting off magnetic lines of force and generating electricity. This creates a plasma circuit between the moon and the planet that emits radio waves.
A bonus of the last days of the Cbadini mission was that the Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument of the orbiter picked up these radio signals on September 27th. , 2017, which were retransmitted to Earth for badysis before the probe burns in Saturn 's atmosphere. The scientists discovered that not only was the plasma interaction remarkably powerful, but that the signals could be accelerated for a duration of 16 minutes to 28.5 seconds and converted to an audio file. "Enceladus is this small generator that circulates around Saturn, and we know that it is a source of continuous energy," said Ali Sulaiman, a planet scientist at the time. University of Iowa, Iowa City, and member of the RPWS team. "Now we find that Saturn responds by sending signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus at hundreds of thousands of kilometers."
These planet / moon interactions are not unique to Saturn. A similar plasma circuit exists between Jupiter and its inner moon Io, but NASA says that there is no such circuit between the Earth and the Moon because the latter is outside the Earth's magnetic field .
The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters (1), (2).
Listen to Saturn / Enceladus radio transmissions converted to audio format in the video below.
View gallery – 2 pictures
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