Saturn’s lovely rings and lots of moons are an impressive sight to see through a telescope. However as NASA’s Voyager and then Cassini spacecraft found, as they rocketed near the planet, Saturn also is surrounded by an unnoticeable web of radio waves that are generated by high-energy particles in the planet’s electro-magnetic field.
Cassini captured a number of recordings of these radio waves, emissions comparable to Earth’s auroral radio emissions, during the more than a years it orbited the planet, prior to it plunged into Saturn’s environment in 2017. In addition to sounding a bit eerie, the radio waves are the cause of a mystery about the planet’s rotational rate.
On this episode of Audible Universe, we tune into some of Saturn’s radio emissions got by the Cassini spacecraft.
Audible Cosmos is produced and reported by Amanda Font and Lowell Robinson.
