Cassini reveals the sounds of Saturn

Although it has been gone for almost a year, the Cassini spacecraft continues to fuel new studies on Saturn and its many moons. In particular, Cassini's unique and close vision of the system during its Grand Final orbits yielded data that revealed how plasma waves emerging from the planet interact with its rings and moons.

Research-based data evaluation was published April 26 and June 7 in Geophysical Research Letters . Now, in a video produced by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the data, you can tune in the "sounds of Saturn": the radio emission generated by these plasma waves traveling along the invisible magnetic field lines connecting the planet moon Enceladus.

As he was diving near the planet at his Grand Final on September 2, 2017, Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was capturing electromagnetic waves while crossing the flow tube Enceladus – a kind of conduit between the moon and the planet, delimited by magnetic field lines and through which charged particles can flow in both directions. The waves fall into the range of human hearing, and scientists have now amplified them in the audio file below, compressing about 16 minutes of data up to 28.5 seconds of spooky spatial sounds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Iowa

Enceladus is a geologically active world, with plumes containing water, carbon dioxide, salts, and even organic compounds. on its south pole. The moon, which is about as wide as the state of Arizona, lies about 148,000 miles (238,000 kilometers) from Saturn, just over half the distance between the Moon and the Earth. "Enceladus is this little generator that circulates around Saturn, and we know that it's a source of continuous energy," said Ali Sulaiman of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and lead author of the report. papers, in a press release. "Now we find that Saturn responds by sending signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines that connect it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of kilometers away."

Plasma is the fourth state of matter. Just as matter may exist in solid, liquid or gaseous form, it may also exist in the form of plasma, in which the atoms are ionized and have lost their electrons, and exists as a soup of positively charged atomic nuclei, and in the form of atoms. floating electrons. The new data show that plasma waves and the energy they carry seem to come and go between Saturn and Enceladus along the magnetic field lines