But one observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.
The music was heard clearly by the magnetometer experiment (RPC-Mag) for the first time in August, when Rosetta drew to within 100 km of 67P/C-G. The scientists think it must be produced in some way by the activity of the comet, as it releases neutral particles into space where they become electrically charged due to a process called ionisation. But the precise physical mechanism behind the oscillations remains a mystery.
As if you were not sufficiently astonished by us landing a spacecraft on a comet hurtling through space, it turns out that the comet is singing us a song!
As a test of ShowBlender's Audio Visualization tools, I ran the Comet's Song through a audio responsive kaleidoscopic motion graphics iterator of a photo of the comet. It has some great looking textures, and makes some fun pareidolia(A Dragons head, faces etc).
Something neat to see while you listen to the cosmic rhythms!
You can download a copy of the OSX application to play with!