The Musical Universe-Rhythm in Saturn’s Rings
This is a continuation of my series The Musical Universe. I have received some interesting feedback on my previous posts and I really appreciate it. My first post in the Musical Universe series was about a black hole emanating a B-flat tone. My second post was about the Rhythm of the Sun. If you haven’t had a chance to read these, you can click here to catch up. This piece today is going to discuss a very interesting phenomenon that was detected in the rings of Saturn. It was discovered from experiments conducted by the Cassini space probe which is orbiting the planet Saturn. While the probe was beaming radio transmissions back to earth through the rings of Saturn, a harmonic rhythmic pattern was discovered. This was very much a surprise to the scientists. They detected order in such a potentially chaotic scenario. Here is an excerpt from NASA’s Jet Propulson Laboratory:
The pattern was detected when the radio on board the Cassini spacecraft sent out three signals toward Earth. The signals crossed the Saturn’s rings, and their frequencies were separated by scattering from the ring particles. Once the signals were captured by Earth-based antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network, Cassini scientists saw a regular pattern in the received signal frequencies.
“The signals showed that the particle groups were arranged in an unexpectedly regular formation that had ‘rhythm within the rings of Saturn’”, said Marouf. “Each particle is in its own orbit, and sometimes they collide and move apart as their velocities change. As a result, you have particles bunched together into dense groups that extend across the ring in harmony with each other.”
To read more about this mission and the rhythm in Saturn’s rings click here.
Add comment October 30th, 2008
