Do meteors make sounds?

What are the odds? ! Emma Zulaiha Zulkifl took this amazing shot in Sabah, on the Malaysian island of Borneo. On December 15, 2018, she caught a bright meteor hurtling right in front of the bright planet Venus. She wrote: "Yes, the meteor did pass in front of Venus! Only some contrast and noise reduction adjustments were made in Photoshop CC2018." Well done, Emma! Some people claim to have heard shooting stars. Is that possible? To look down.

Listen, the sound of a shooting star?

The moment we encounter a shooting star is not only fun, but also awe-inspiring. That fleeting flash of light is a reminder that there are tiny rocks and even tinier grains of ice -- almost none larger than a grain of sand -- entering the Earth's atmosphere at any given moment. Most of them burn up in the atmosphere long before they reach the Earth's surface. Seeing meteors is fun, but is it possible to hear them, too?

Now it seems that astronomers do.

Hear VLF radio waves?

For years, professional astronomers dismissed ideas from meteor sounds as fabrications. Why is that? Typically, meteors burn up about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. Sound travels much slower than light. After observing a particularly large meteor, we shouldn't be able to hear it rumble for a few minutes. It's like hearing thunder after the flash has already happened. A 60-mile-high meteor exploded about five minutes after it appeared. It was a "sonic" meteor. The noise it makes is related to the sonic boom caused by supersonic aircraft.

Buzz, sizzle, sizzle

In 2013, Live Science reported on a typical example of people hearing meteors. It happened in 817 AD when a meteor shower passed over China. According to a 1992 report by Colin Keay, a physicist at the University of Newcastle in Australia, many observers reported hearing buzzing, sizzling, and hissing. A similar event took place in England in 1719.

Astronomer Edmond Halley said:

Astronaut Edmond Hally:

There have been several incidents of meteors passing by, many of them the result of pure fantasy, such as being surrounded by the sound of its hiss as it advances.

The rejection of these observations, suggesting that sound perception may be a psychological effect through "frightened imagination," set back the study of the phenomenon by nearly two centuries.

A meteor in 1978 changed people's minds

It wasn't until the 1970s and beyond that scientists began to take such reports seriously. As Keay reports in the magazine Asteroids, Comets, Meteors, those who claim to have heard meteors are dismissed as lunacy. But then, in 1978, a large meteor over New South Wales caused hundreds of reports. Keay analyzed 36 of these reports.

VLF waves travel at the speed of light, so observers will hear the meteors as they pass overhead. But these waves need something physical to act as a transducer and make a sound. Keay found that objects as diverse as aluminum foil, typing paper, plant leaves like pine needles, thin wires, dry hair and wireland-framed glasses can produce that sound, a phenomenon known as electrosonography.

Here's an example of an observer that pulls these objects together:

When I was out watching the Leonid meteor shower in 1999, my head fell to the ground and I heard a hissing sound. My head is close to the grass and then away. I also wear wire-rimmed glasses. The sound apparently coincided with the observation of a rather large bright light.

Meteor in Mongolia

A team of scientists conducted extensive experiments in Mongolia during the 1998 Leonid meteor shower. They were very careful to find a location, in the heart of Mongolia, devoid of life, devoid of any nocturnal activity of humans and animals and power lines and AC electrical equipment of any kind. It's freezing cold in snow-covered Pingyuan, -17 degrees Fahrenheit (-27 degrees Celsius). In addition to capturing sound recordings from the two bright meteors, visual observers also heard the sound of the meteors. These are their results and these are from other studies.

The sound comes just before the brightest moment

You can especially hear the sound before the firemeteors reach their maximum brightness. The frequency of sound is 37 to 44 Hertz. The average person can hear sounds at frequencies ranging from 20 to 20,000 Hertz, so meteors were near the low end of that range. You've probably heard a 30 Hertz sound if you've ever driven fast on the highway with the back window open.

How can you increase your chances of hearing a shooting star?

Here are some suggestions: Sit on a plastic tarp near a dry leaf, roll up your hair, and wear wirelessly rimmed glasses with sheets of aluminum foil and printer paper on the sides. Check out the discussion and comments here.

It's not just meteors that produce low-frequency sounds. Auroras, earthquakes and the phased return of large rockets also produce electrical sounds.

Hear more shooting stars than you see?

Keay's hypothesis was further tested on November 18, 1999. The researchers detected different VLF sounds and found that many meteors could be heard even though they could not be seen by the eye. In fact, they detected 50 times more meteors with the VLF signal than with line of sight alone. Dennis Gallagher, a space physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said:

What makes this exciting is that we're talking about a phenomenon that people have been experiencing for probably thousands of years. Even in modern times it is reported that people who hear such voices are laughed at. It was only about 25 years ago that Keay could do the research that made the experience of all those generations seem acceptable. It shows that there are still wonders in nature that have yet to be realized and understood. We should use this meteor experience as a reason to open our minds to what we still have to learn.

Fun fact: When meteoroids -- rocky bodies as small as dust from space -- burn up in the atmosphere, they're called meteors. When a meteorite is big enough to survive entering the atmosphere and hitting the ground, it is called a meteorite.

Garth Battista took this photo in the Catskill Mountains on Aug 4, 2022. "This bright meteor burned up just after midnight last night over the Catskill Mountains," Garth wrote. Thank you Garth!