New Delhi: To celebrate the grand finale of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft next month, astrophysicists have created music from the Saturn’s moons and rings – converting their rhythmic orbits into musical octaves.
The Cassini spacecraft has been collecting data while orbiting Saturn since its arrival in 2004 and is now in the throes of a final death spiral.
It will plunge into the planet itself on September 15 to avoid contaminating any of its moons.
After centuries of looking with awe and wonder at the beauty of Saturn and its rings, we can now listen to them, scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada said.
The conversion to music is made possible by orbital resonances, which occur when two objects execute different numbers of complete orbits in the same time, so that they keep returning to their initial configuration.
The rhythmic gravitational tugs between them keep them locked in a tight repeating pattern which can also be converted directly into musical harmony.
“To celebrate the Grand Finale of NASA‘s Cassini mission next month, we converted Saturn’s moons and rings into two pieces of music,” said Matt Russo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).
“Wherever there is resonance there is music, and no other place in the solar system is more packed with resonances than Saturn,” said Russo.
“Saturn’s magnificent rings act like a sounding board that launches waves at locations that harmonise with the planet’s many moons, and some pairs of moons are themselves locked in resonances,” Dan Tamayo, a postdoctoral researcher at CITA.
The musical notes and rhythms both come from the orbital motion of Saturn’s moons along with the orbits of the trillions of small particles that make up the ring system.
PTI