Thursday, August 21, 2014

Music from space--gamma ray bursts and planetary magnetospheres


When I concluded Curiosity and other Mars news from the past two weeks by saying to stay tuned for more space news, I forgot that I wasn't done with space music when I posted 2001 music for the 2001st post.  I have some more from Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday to share.  Tanya Lewis of LiveScience brought Distant Galaxies' Explosions Become Psychedelic Songs via Yahoo! News two weeks ago.
An astronomer and a graphic artist have teamed up to turn powerful explosions in distant galaxies into spellbinding music and animations. The unique celestial compositions are psychedelic and strangely beautiful.

Known as gamma-ray bursts, these explosions of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation are the brightest events known to occur in the universe. Sylvia Zhu, a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, studies gamma-ray bursts at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
In addition to an embed of the video of the latest composition at the link, it's also available on Vimeo.  Here it is.

GRB suite from Turner Gillespie on Vimeo.

Follow over the jump for an older video converting gamma rays bursts into music and a bonus video of near-Earth space sounds that also sound musical.

First, GRBToMusicNEW H 264.

Putting a Fermi Gamma-ray burst to music. Made by Sylvia Zhu (Music) and Judy Racusin (animation)
This is the same music as the opening of the Vimeo version.

Next, LiveScience on YouTube presents Earth and Planets Make Strange, Exquisite Noises | Video Compilation, originally from Space.com.

Created by lightning, ‘whistlers’ travel along Earth's magnetic field lines from hemisphere to hemisphere. Jupiter’s charged particles ‘sing’ across its magnetosphere (recorded by Voyager). -- 'Whistling' Volcanic Lightning
Yes, science is cool.  Also, we live in science fiction times when we can actually hear the music of the spheres.

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