Is there a world out there waiting to be discovered?
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Recording equipment set up by a graduate student as part of a NASA project to record sound from the edges of the atmosphere has picked up “infrasound” — frequencies so low that they can’t be heard by human ears.
The Independent reported the equipment picked up whistles and hisses that could be ascertained by speeding up the infrasound recordings.
The recordings were taken from a helium balloon in August last year. The microphones dangled over New Mexico and Arizona and were key to getting the first infrasound recordings ever taken at such altitudes, according to Daniel Bowman, the University of North Carolina student who captured the sounds.
“It sounds kind of like ‘The X-Files,'” Bowman told Live Science.
Current guesses as to the origin of the noises include sound from a wind farm, the ocean, or vibrations from cables on the balloon, according to the science news blog. NASA scientists will be sending up more devices later this year as and hope that they can learn more then.
“I was surprised by the sheer complexity of the signal,” Bowman said.
Bowman, who has been constructing and launching his own high-altitude balloons since high school, hopes that his experiment will revive interest in atmospheric infrasound.
“There haven’t been acoustic recordings in the stratosphere for 50 years. Surely, if we place instruments up there, we will find things we haven’t seen before,” he told Live Science.
The Independent even noted some scientists have proposed sending similar equipment to the moon and Mars, where it might be able to pick up transmit information about the extraterrestrial weather and the environment.