An eerie and at the same time fascinating radio signal comes from Venus, transformed by NASA into a space melody. And that today we can all listen to.
Among the wonders of our Solar System, the planet Venus has always exerted a particular fascination. A seduction associated since ancient times with the goddess of beauty, and which has attracted poets, astronomers, and even ufologists to itself. Millennia later, and with modern technologies available, science continues to look at the infernal celestial body. Not surprisingly, NASA has managed to capture an eerie and intriguing radio signal coming from the surface of Venus.
The melody of the vesper
The planet of the vesper – because well visible at sunset from Earth – has managed to “communicate” with us thanks to the Parker Solar Probe, NASA’s spacecraft that in July 2020 approached Venus. The passage last year was so close – it came to only 517 miles away during the third flyover – to allow the probe to pick up radio signals emitted naturally from the planet’s ionosphere. This is the region of the upper atmosphere affected by the radiation of the Sun, which makes the surface “vibrate”.
Collected these data, today the U.S. space agency can give us what seems a real melody of the planet Venus. Those more accustomed to technicalities will probably know that these are radio signals transformed into sounds thanks to a particularly sophisticated instrument – the FIELDS supplied to the Parker Solar Probe -, while dreamers can enjoy the “alien” message, arrived to our ears from about 0.17 billion kilometers – so much distance between Venus and Earth.
NASA scientists, in addition to sharing the natural language of Venus on YouTube, hope to use the signals to understand how Venus became the planet we see today by studying its evolution through sound waves. After the incredible discovery of the existence of fungi on Mars, the radio signals are therefore the focus of a publication in the Geophysical Research Letters, for a study born almost by chance, and immediately turned into very interesting material for the government agency stars and stripes.
Venus: a planet “grumpy”
The missions on Venus are in fact particularly complex, because of the high temperatures that are recorded on the planet, capable of reaching about 450 degrees. Not only that, the atmosphere is very dense with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid rains make even the most basic maneuvers very difficult. Difficulties that could be circumvented using the sound signals picked up by the Parker Solar Probe, first launched in 2018 to study the Sun and get within 4.3 million miles of the center of our star by 2025. The probe’s contribution, again according to the study, for the time being confirms that Venus’ upper atmosphere undergoes puzzling changes during one solar cycle, the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle.
Andrea Guerriero