Santa Cruz Sentinel, February 11, 2010.
The silent sterility of space mutes even the most destructive astronomical events.
But Gregory Laughlin is translating — “sonifying” — stellar movements into sound, allowing the public to listen in on thousands of years of gravitational interplay between a star and its orbiting planets.
Laughlin, an astronomy professor at UC Santa Cruz, will be featured on KZSC”s “On What Grounds?” today to discuss his work and his upcoming lecture with composer Philip Glass on art and science, and to play some of the sounds he has created. Read More >
The Galilean satellites, or Jupiter’s moons as they are known to lay-folk like myself, were the first objects found orbiting something other than Earth or the Sun. The four Galiean moons, seen from top to bottom in NASA image at the right, are Io, Europa, Ganymede (the big daddy of the bunch) and Callisto. All are more than 3000 km in diameter. Though they may be large for moons, Jupiter dwarfs them, weighing in at five thousand times more massive and causing them extreme tidal stress. Jupiter is also radioactive, bathing its moons in high-energy electron beams and radio emissions.