New York — Scientists have discovered cosmic waves that… It sounds like birds chirping In an unexpected place.
These bursts of plasma, called chorus waves, undulate at the same frequency Human hearing. When converted into audio signals, they mimic sharp tones High-pitched bird calls.
Researchers have captured such sounds in space before, but now they have sensed the chirping waves from much farther away: more than 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth, where they have never been measured before.
“This opens up a lot of new questions about the physics that could be possible in this field,” said Allison Gaines, a space physicist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the work.
Scientists are still not sure how the disturbances occur, but they think Earth’s magnetic field It might have something to do with it.
The chorus has been picked up on radio antennas for decades, including receivers at the Antarctic Research Station in the 1960s. Its twin spacecraft – NASA’s Van Allen Probes – heard a chirp from Earth’s radiation belts at a closer distance than the newest discovery.
The most recent observations were captured by NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiband Satellites, which launched in 2015 to explore the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields. New search It was published on Wednesday In the journal Nature.
Chorus waves have also been observed near other planets including Jupiter and Saturn. They can also produce high-energy electrons capable of jamming satellite communications.
“It is one of the strongest and most important waves in space,” study author Zhengming Liu of Beihang University said in an email.
The newly discovered chorus waves were detected in a region where the Earth’s magnetic field extends, which scientists did not expect. This raises new questions about how these chirping waves form.
“It’s very captivating and very compelling,” Gaines said. “We definitely need to find more of these events.”
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