Ask most people to hum some music from the planets and they’ll probably regale you with a few bars of Holst. But thanks to NASA’s two Voyager space probes, we no longer have to rely on human composers to imagine the sorts of sounds which best suit the orbs in our solar system. We can, in fact, sit back and let the planets do the singing…
You see, both Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched into space 35 years ago (a fact celebrated this evening in BBC4’s new documentary Voyager: to the Final Frontier), and since then, in addition to sending back some of the most detailed images of our planetary neighbours ever taken, they’ve also inadvertently provided us with recordings of those worlds’ sounds too.
“But surely,” I hear you cry, “in space no-one can hear you scream!” How is it possible to record sound in the noiseless void of space?
Well, as part of their data-collecting mission, the Voyager probes recorded the electromagnetic waves emmanating from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as they passed by those planets. These signals were then translated by NASA into sound, which effectively gave us real honest-to-goodness planetary music. What’s it like? Well, rather dark, ambient and haunting. Here’s a sample of Jupiter’s “theme”: