What Does It Mean When a Comet Plays Music?

The world sat up and took notice last week as the Rosetta space probe’s Philae lander touched down on comet 67P-Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a 10-year, 4- billion mile trip from Earth. There it detected traces of organic matter and water.

It also detected music.

“ ... One observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise,” a European Space Agency blogger wrote last week. “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.”

A recording of the comet is available here. It sounds like a frog playing an eerie but quite musical tune by flicking a finger into his puffed out cheek, emitting a sequence of notes at twenty times normal speed.

I find this “tune,” emanating from a 2.7 mile-long rubber-ducky shaped piece of rock orbiting the sun at 84,000 mph, both compelling and touching.

I spent several years of my life researching both the negative effects of excess sound on the well-being of humans, and also the benefits of bringing back a relative silence into our lifestyles.

But finding what I considered to be the right balance of sound and silence also had the effect of reinforcing, in my mind, the extent to which our lives and our consciousness are expressed in that balance, and in particular in the rhythms and music that result.

I’ll cite an example. Noise—unwanted sound—expresses dysfunction, whether in jet engines winding up too close by, or in a shriek of alarm. On the other hand, the interplay of quiet and human breath; of silence and the first notes in Satie’s Gymnopédie # 1; of pauses, and the words of a character in a Beckett play, seem to contribute to a common harmony.

67P is not the only singer out there. NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory detected a B-flat note emanating from a black hole in the Perseus cluster. That note, 37 octaves below a Steinway's middle-C, pervades the known universe.

Our own planet hums a 10 milliherz note possibly struck by seismic waves reverberating in Earth’s atmosphere.

Is it anthropomorphizing to suggest that the “tune” a comet emits resonates somehow with that basic, cosmic interplay between silence and sound, as well as with our own perception thereof?