But one observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.
The music was heard clearly by the magnetometer experiment (RPC-Mag) for the first time in August, when Rosetta drew to within 100 km of 67P/C-G. The scientists think it must be produced in some way by the activity of the comet, as it releases neutral particles into space where they become electrically charged due to a process called ionisation. But the precise physical mechanism behind the oscillations remains a mystery.
As if you were not sufficiently astonished by us landing a spacecraft on a comet hurtling through space, it turns out that the comet is singing us a song!
As a test of ShowBlender's Audio Visualization tools, I ran the Comet's Song through a audio responsive kaleidoscopic motion graphics iterator of a photo of the comet. It has some great looking textures, and makes some fun pareidolia(A Dragons head, faces etc).