Venus is silent: I played lightning on five worlds by one rule, and the receiver that hears Earth crackle hears nothing at Venus
Through one receiver and one rule, Earth's signal stands 460 times over Venus's and 333 times over Saturn's. Lightning has been reported on five bodies, and I sound all five by one rule. Three are heard through one instrument: Cassini's high-frequency receiver, which picks up lightning as brief bursts of shortwave radio. Passing Earth in 1999 it heard Earth's lightning and human shortwave stations; passing Venus the same year it heard none (Gurnett et al. 2001); orbiting Saturn in 2004 it recorded Saturn's lightning (Fischer et al. 2006). I map 1.2 to 16 MHz onto 1.5 to 20 kHz, the top of human hearing, and play the hours 240 times faster. Earth's strongest signal, 4.0 × 10⁻⁶ V/m/√Hz, stands 460 times over Venus's 8.7 × 10⁻⁹ and 333 times over Saturn's 1.2 × 10⁻⁸. Uranus's lightning is taken from Voyager 2's radio receiver, where it was found (Zarka and Pedersen 1986); Jupiter's from the Voyager 1 whistlers that first revealed lightning on another planet (Gurnett et al. 1979). I found no earlier audio of Uranus's lightning and no audio pairing of Earth and Venus through one receiver. This record holds the paper (OCO paper IP-A26) and its 5 sounds. Headphones. Part of The sound of the sky: 12 papers and their sounds: 10.5281/zenodo.23986764.
Authors
- Ivan Petrov Ivanov
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-11-05
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23986781
- Primary Topic
- Lightning and Electromagnetic Phenomena
- Type
- preprint