Don Gurnett, the principal investigator for the Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, spent decades turning the electromagnetic noise of the outer planets into something a human ear could parse. The Saturn file -- a translation of radio emissions associated with the planet's auroras -- sounds less like a planet than like a haunted choir. Rising whistles. Descending moans. A texture that anyone who has watched a horror film recognizes instantly, even though no one designed it to sound that way.
The popular framing of these recordings goes like this: NASA pointed a microphone at Saturn, and Saturn screamed. That framing is approximately right in its emotional effect and almost entirely wrong in its physics. There is no sound in space in any meaningful sense. The interplanetary medium is too thin to carry the pressure waves human ears evolved to detect. What spacecraft like Cassini, Voyager, and Juno actually record are electromagnetic vibrations -- radio waves, plasma oscillations, and magnetic field fluctuations -- that happen to occur in frequency ranges close enough to human hearing that a straightforward translation produces something audible.
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