NASA’s Halloween Playlist Shares Spooky Solar System Sounds

NASA put together a “spooky” playlist of space sounds in honor of Halloween, with audio files from its various missions over the years to places like Jupiter, Saturn and the moons of the outer solar system.

It’s true that the emptiness of space lacks any medium on which sound waves can travel, preventing you from hearing anything from the great void (although it doesn’t hinder your other senses, like smell). But the sounds transmitted back to Earth from NASA’s space probes aren’t sounds in the classic sense — they are emissions from the electromagnetic spectrum that are converted into sound waves.

In the case of Saturn, for example, NASA explains that the planet “is a source of intense radio emissions.” The Cassini spacecraft, which was surveying the outer solar system in the area around Saturn for several years before its mission ended in September, picked up those radio emissions.

“The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet,” NASA said. “These auroras are similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights.”

Auroras throughout the solar system crop up when charged particles and other material from the sun is blown outward and interacts with the magnetic fields and atmospheric gases of the planets.

The space agency has previously released sounds that came from Cassini’s observations of Saturn. After the spacecraft took a historic dive into the space between the planet and its rings, marking the first time a probe had ever ventured there, NASA released files of the spacecraft whizzing past dust particles in the gap. The whooshes and squeaks that Cassini heard during its dive were distinct from the pops that it heard when it simply crossed the rings’ plane.

If simple sounds are not enough, a team of astrophysicists has also transformed Cassini’s data from Saturn into actual music. The group took the orbital resonance frequencies of Saturn’s moons and the dust particles in its rings and converted them into sounds that humans can perceive, shifting them along to the range that our ears can pick up.

In NASA’s Halloween playlist on SoundCloud, there are sounds collected from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, of lightning on Jupiter, and of a spacecraft being pelted with dust particles from a passing comet.

One of the items on the list, emissions from star KIC7671081B snagged by the Kepler spacecraft, sounds like the soundtrack to a villain entering a movie scene.

There is also a track from radio waves in Earth’s own atmosphere that sounds like creatures in a rainforest chirping, a track called “whistler waves” that sounds like the beginning of a Rush song, and radar echoes from the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan that could be the sound effects on a video game. The track from Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, could also potentially be used in an arcade game.