Have you ever wondered if our planet is really silent? Perhaps you knew that Earth emitted a low hum thought to be from the ocean or the atmosphere. But did you know that she is loud enough to alert aliens?
Space.com reported that our planet literally emits piercing sounds into the atmosphere. "An ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening," to be exact.
Apparently scientists have been aware of this radio frequency since the 1970s. The theory is that radio waves "ooze" into space in an ever-widening cone like fashion, like the light coming from a torch-light.
The sounds are created high above Earth where charged particles from solar wind collide with our magnetic field. The same phenomena that creates the Northern Lights or
Auroras. Click on the Space.com link to access an actual audio clip of the sounds.
So why do we not hear these loud sounds here on the ground? A charged layer, the
ionosphere, blocks the sounds preventing them from reaching earth and good thing too or our eardrums would be shattered to bits and pieces. Consider this;
the out-of-this-world radio waves are 10,000 times stronger than even the strongest military signal, the researchers said, and they would overwhelm all radio stations on the planet.
So what does this mean? These sounds are more detectable in space to anyone there who might be listening. As the new data from the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, which is gathered from a group of four high-flying satellites reveals that these bursts of radio waves are directed into the cosmos in a beam-like fashion. In other words, we are basically calling out to anyone listening, that we are here. Not hard for any alien who might be looking and listening, to find.
The Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR), as it is called, is beamed out in a narrow plane, as if someone had put a mask over a torch and left a slit for the radiation to escape.
This flat beam could be detected by aliens who've figured this process out, the researchers say. The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search. They could also learn more about Jupiter and Saturn by studying AKR, which should emit from the auroral activity on those worlds, too.
"Whenever you have aurora, you get AKR," said Robert Mutel, a University of Iowa researcher involved in the work.
The AKR bursts -- Mutel and colleagues studied 12,000 of them -- originate in spots the size of a large city a few thousand miles above Earth and above the region where the Northern Lights form.
"We can now determine exactly where the emission is coming from," Mutel said.
And so there you have it. How we
really make contact with aliens...if they're out there. But that is another topic for discussion.
I do find this story interesting though because even though I do not know whether the aliens as described by those who've been 'abducted' exist or not - I firmly believe Someone out there is listening - God.