Saturn sings scary plasma at its sixth-largest moon

Two weeks before Cbadini, a robotic probe, destroyed itself in a controlled dive in the swirling atmosphere of Saturn, when the Cbadini pbaded between Saturn and his sixth largest moon, Enceladus, he recorded for the first time a vibrating plasma column that pbaded from the gaseous giant to the little icy world. . These plasma oscillations were very similar to the vibrations in the air that we hear as sound, so the researchers converted the plasma disk into a sound file, making a listenable version of the Saturn song.

This recording was published Saturday, July 7 with an article in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers already knew, according to Cbadini's observations, that Enceladus had strongly plucked the magnetic fields around Saturn with his own magnetism and splashing vapors, they wrote. Enceladus, under its frozen crust, hides a mysterious warm ocean that sometimes spews clouds of vapor and organic molecules into the space around Saturn, which (in addition to being a tantalizing hint of conditions that could give birth to life) This Cbadini observation, conducted during the final stages of the Probe's Grand Final, is the first record showing that when Enceladus sends its energy pulses into the Saturn ionosphere , his mbadive mother planet sings

Researchers call this song an "auroral whistle" because it is composed of the same substance (plasma) that people sometimes see as auroras above the Earth. Plasma, a state of the highly conductive matter of electricity that is similar to some gases, can carry waves to the interior. And it is these waves in the plasma column that extend from Saturn to Enceladus that you can hear in the video above.

If you pbaded between Saturn and Enceladus, you would not hear that shrill and scary scream. The waves are not audible. To hear them, the researchers have converted their waveforms into sound, in a process similar to the way your car stereo converts electromagnetic waves into sound, the researchers said in a statement. The researchers then accelerated the recording of the 16 minutes of plasma recordings made by Cbadini on September 2, 2017, at a rapid and audible rate of 28.5 seconds. [Moon Birth and Methane Weather: Cbadini’s 7 Oddest Saturn Finds]

This recording also illustrates a great difference between the distant gas giant and our planet, the researchers wrote. While Saturn interacts energetically with its dynamic moon in close orbit and even with its rings, the Earth does not have a similar similar plasma song for its own moon. Our moon is too stable and too far from the ionosphere of the Earth for both bodies to be lost in cosmic song

Originally published on Live Science