The landing of the probe Philae on the surface of the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko is huge news in the exploration and understanding of the habits of space comets. You saw the images of his austere black landscape of ice, dust and rock particles, and impressive structures, spire-like that reach into space. Thank you to those images, we are all aware of how he looks.
ESA
remote comet, as seen by the spacecraft Rosetta .
But did you know how he sound ? Yes. The comet makes noise: it sings.
First, a quick background. The rocky structure where Philae landed is the nucleus of the comet. Comets are surrounded by gas, plasma and dust that give him to ground observers, their characteristic tails. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, and is an electrically conductive gas which may contain magnetic fields and electric currents. The comet 67P has an "atmosphere" plasma known as a coma, that surrounds it. While the study of interactions between the comet's plasma and its interaction with the solar wind (which is also the plasma emitted by the Sun), scientists noticed something surprising.
Comet 67P emits a "chirping" a repeated pattern of noise caused by oscillations in the magnetic field. These oscillations were taken over by Rosetta Plasma Consortium (RPC), a set of five instruments designed specifically to provide information on the plasma environment of the comet. RPC detected sounds November 11, a day before Philae descended to the surface. The "song" is being produced at 40-50 millihertz, which is much lower than the human ear can detect. To make it audible, frequencies were increased by a factor of 10,000.
Still, scientists are puzzled as to why this happens. The general assumption is that the song is produced by the activity of the comet. They know that the song also releases neutral particles in space, where they become ionized, but other than that, the song of the comet remains a mystery, and one that the CPP team is eager to solve.
Via ESA (They also put on a cartoon super cute landing Philae !)
0 Komentar