The mysteries of space include terrifying finds, like this eerie sound captured by the Voyager 1 probe of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (POTfor its acronym in English) in deep outer space, a region of the galaxy that lies beyond the orbit of the Moon.
According to a report published on the website of Debatescientists from the US space agency are still discussing what exactly this noise is, where it really comes from and what consequences it could have.
The version released by experts in 2022 suggests that the recording is the product of interstellar gas, apparently generated by “thermally excited plasma oscillations and quasi-thermal noise.”
For its part, an investigation by Stella Ocker, an expert at Cornell University in New York, published in the journal Nature, explained that Voyager 1 can capture “the density of interstellar plasma in the absence of plasma oscillation events generated by crashes”.
disturbances in interstellar gas
The audio became more striking when astronomers became aware of disturbances in space gas caused by stars.
But curiously, the sound is radically different. Normally, it is heard as a pop, similar to thunder in a storm. As heard in the video shared by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the calm that surrounds the hum is what makes the sound different and therefore arouses the interest of experts.
“Voyager 1’s plasma wave instrument detected vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and from April to May 2013. The graph shows the frequency of the waves, which indicate the density of the plasma”, explains the description of the video.
“The colors indicate the intensity of the waves, or how ‘strong’ they are. Red indicates the strongest waves and blue the weakest. The soundtrack reproduces the amplitude and frequency of the plasma waves as ‘heard’ by Voyager 1. The waves detected by the instrument’s antennae can easily be amplified and reproduced through a loudspeaker.”