Guide · Sounds of the sky

Listen to the sky

Twenty-one sounds from space, made in your browser from published measurements: radio storms on Jupiter that a wire antenna can catch, meteor echoes, the first pulsar, a helicopter on Mars, the Moon ringing like a bell, two black holes merging. Press play on any of them.

None of them is a recording. Each is our reconstruction from the numbers scientists published — frequencies, periods, lengths and rates — and each says whether you hear it at its own pitch or sped up.

Catch it with a radio

You could hear these yourself — or could have, in 1957 — with an antenna and a receiver.

  • Jupiter’s radio storms — surf-like L-bursts and crackling S-bursts at 20.1 MHz, the frequency of NASA’s Radio JOVE kits.
  • The Sun on the radio — type III bursts from beams of electrons, each a rush of noise that fades within seconds.
  • The Geminids on the radio — meteor echoes of the French radar GRAVES on 143.050 MHz.
  • Sputnik’s beep — 0.3-second beeps on 20.005 MHz, sliding in pitch as it passed over.

Pulsars: stars you can hear spin

A neutron star sweeps its radio beam past us once a turn. Played as a radio telescope detects it, every turn is a pulse — from a tick every second and a third to a note of 642 turns a second.

  • CP 1919, the first pulsar — a pulse every 1.3373 seconds, found by Jocelyn Bell in 1967.
  • The Crab pulsar — about 30 turns a second, with giant pulses.
  • The Vela pulsar — 11.2 turns a second, one of the brightest in the radio sky.
  • A pulsar that hums a note — PSR B1937+21 turns 641.9 times a second.
  • The 42 pulsars of 47 Tucanae — every pulsar of a globular cluster at its own spin rate.

What spacecraft and instruments heard

Microphones on Mars, radio and plasma receivers on spacecraft, a seismometer on the Moon.

  • Wind and a helicopter on Mars — Perseverance’s microphone and Ingenuity’s 84 Hz hum.
  • Cassini dives through Saturn’s rings — dust grains popping on the antennas, and “the big empty”.
  • Saturn’s radio heartbeat — two radio rhythms, 10.6 and 10.8 hours.
  • The Moon rings like a bell — Apollo 12’s seismometer after the ascent stage hit the Moon.
  • Voyager 1 in interstellar space — the plasma ringing at 2.2 and 2.6 kHz.
  • The singing comet — magnetic waves around comet 67P, sped up 10,000 times.

Waves around the Earth

Radio waves at audio frequencies, made in the Earth’s magnetic field — a receiver plays them as they are.

  • Earth’s dawn chorus — rising chirps from electrons in the radiation belts.
  • Lightning whistlers — the crack of lightning drawn out into a falling whistle.

Stars that ring

Sound waves trapped inside stars make them quiver. The bigger the star, the deeper the song.

  • The Sun’s five-minute song — its strongest oscillations, sped up 100,000 times.
  • Aldebaran’s slow song — a red giant ringing once every five days, sped up 50 million times.

Black holes

One sings through the gas around it; two others shook space itself.

  • The black hole that sings B-flat — sound waves in the Perseus cluster, 57 octaves below middle C.
  • Two black holes merge — LIGO’s first gravitational waves, rising from 35 to 250 Hz.

How these sounds are made

Every sound on this page is synthesised in your browser while it plays, from random numbers and filters shaped by published measurements: the period of a pulsar, the length and rate of Jupiter’s bursts, the speed of sound on Mars, the frequency of the plasma around Voyager 1. Nothing is downloaded, and no two plays are quite the same. Each card says whether you hear the sound at its own pitch — the radio sounds, the chorus and the pulsars are — or how much faster it is played, and “How this sound is made” lists what it is based on.

Some of these things were recorded for real: microphones on Mars, plasma wave instruments on spacecraft, radio telescopes and seismometers. Their published recordings and NASA’s and ESA’s own sonifications are worth hearing too. For more sounds of space — and of everything else — visit Ears & Waves.

Sources and credits

Each sound lists its sources under “How this sound is made”. Planet maps: the StarsMenu Solar System model; picture credits are on About & data.