If you stop and think about it, Interplanetary and Interstellar space are really creepy. There's just so much nothingness that we know so little about, and when we do encounter something our understanding is infinitesimally small. And when you convert some of our encounters to sound waves and make sure we can hear it...you can sometimes wish you hadn't. It is both scary and fascinating, which is what drives humanity to keep exploring, to make the unknown known, to take the fear away from the scary.
NASA probes have been recording and exploring for us for decades. The most famous of them - Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 - were both launched in 1977 (the same year
Star Wars: A New Hope was released). There have been other probes, of course: Juno (to Jupiter), Cassini (to Saturn), Reconnaissance and Curiosity and Perseverance (to Mars), among many others. What they've found has only scratched the surface of what's out there. Then there are the ground-based and orbital facilities, such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, VLA (Very Large Array of radio telescopes), Mauna Kea observatory, and so many, many others, all of which are striving to improve our understanding of the universe we live in.
Optical imagery is beautiful and compelling; the audio just brings home how careful we need to be and how fragile we really are.
8 Strangest sounds recorded in space. This is a little dated, now, but still interesting. It is a compilation of various sounds recorded by some of the afore-mentioned probes.
Nasa releases audio of what a black hole 'sounds' like. This is a short clip, and the audio was extrapolated and compiled from the observed effects of gravity on clouds of gas.
What's somewhat funny about the following 2 clips (they're both older clips) is that the two events that have the most destructive capacity also have the cutest sounds:
Scary Sounds of Space
Scary Sounds of Space (Part 2)
In other news...I worked through Christmas & New Year. It was draining and a little stressful, such that I wasn't able to sit back and relax and unwind, because I was working during the day and on-call during the holidays and nights...so had to keep my phone and laptop nearby just in case. I didn't get many calls, fortunately, but the lack of incoming work doesn't detract from the tension of having to be ready because something
might happen.
The first week back at the office...could have done without it. Didn't find out until Tuesday morning that there was only going to be 2 of us working that first week. Managed to make it all go through, but it was still tiring. My already-drained creativity took a hit - I want to write, but the
will to write isn't there, and it's hurting me in more areas than here. One day I'll pull out of it, but it's not going to be something I can force, I think: it'll happen when it happens.
Take care, BMR.
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