As we reach out to Jupiter via the Juno probe, the big planet is reaching out to us, as Spaceweather.com reports:
Yesterday, a series of narrow radio beams from Jupiter reached Earth … but they weren’t from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. They came from Jupiter itself. Natural radio lasers in Jupiter’s magnetosphere send shortwave signals into space and occasionally they sweep past Earth. “I picked them up in broad daylight,” says Thomas Ashcraft, who operates an amateur radio telescope in rural New Mexico.
Spaceweather.com includes a link to an audio interpretation of the received beams, which I’m sure is quite significant to those familiar with the standard signal at 22.4 and 22.2 MHz, but doesn’t mean much to me. But I must say, natural radio lasers on Jupiter – very cool.
Source: NASA, ESA, I. de Pater and M. Wong (University of California, Berkeley)
