Have any extropians heard a meteor? I live in a very rural area where it's
quiet at night, and I think I heard one (not a Leonid, it was last Spring)
that actually shook my whole house as it hit the Earth (I speculate not too
far away). It sounded like "...zzzzzzzzt!" ...like an amplified bass woofer
with slight doppler effect change in frequency might sound if hurtling toward
an observer, and I think it was entirely acoustic rather than VLF radio as
described in the article below.
--J. R.
Listening to Leonids
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast26nov_1.htm?list76937
November 26, 2001: All at once there was a eye-squinting flash of light and a
strange crackling noise. Puzzled sky watchers looked at one another ... and
confessed: "Yes, I heard it, too."
Hearing meteors? It could happen -- and indeed it did, plenty of times during
this month's Leonid meteor storm.
"I am sure I could hear several of the meteors," recalled Karen Newcombe, a
Leonid watcher from San Francisco -- one of many who reported meteor sounds to
Science@NASA on Nov. 18th. "Several times when a Leonid with a persistent
debris train flew directly overhead, I heard a faint fizzing noise
[instantly]." There was no delay between the sight and the sound.
"How is that possible when the meteor was so many miles above my head?" she
wondered.
The same question has bedeviled some of history's greatest scientists. For
example, in 1719 astronomer Edmund Halley collected accounts of a
widely-observed fireball over England. Many witnesses, wrote Halley, "[heard]
it hiss as it went along, as if it had been very near at hand." Yet his own
research proved the meteor was at least "60 English miles" high. Sound takes
about five minutes to travel such a distance, while light can do it in a
fraction of a millisecond. Halley could think of no way for sky watchers to
simultaneously hear and see the meteor.
Baffled, he finally dismissed the reports as "pure fantasy" -- a view that
held sway for centuries.
Yet just last weekend scores of people little inclined to fantasy heard the
Leonids. The sounds weren't rumbling sonic booms or the loud crack of a
distant explosion arriving long after the meteor's flash had come and gone.
Rather, these were exotic, delicate noises, heard while the meteor was in full
view. Scientists call them "electrophonic meteor sounds."
Meteor listeners have long been reluctant to report their experiences -- a
result of Halley-esque skepticism. But hearing a meteor doesn't mean you're
crazy. Indeed, modern researchers are increasingly convinced that the
electrophonic sounds are real.
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