Comets Can Sing, Apparently

This story mixes two of my favourite areas of nerdom: music and astronomy.

Today scientists hope to land a one-cubic-metre-sized probe on a comet called Churyumov-Gerasimenko 67P. No one has ever attempted anything like this before. Live telemetry tells us that the comet is moving at 66,118.81 kph, which works out to 18.37 kilometres per second. And they want to land this little probe called Philae on the thing.

[UPDATE: It made it!]

As it approached, Philae heard something: the comet appears to be singing.  This recording (magnified and transposed so we can hear it) starts as a croak but then begins to sound like something from deep in the mix of a 7os-era prog-rock album.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/176387011″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

More information at The Daily Mail.