SATURN Sounds Part 2: Resonances Of Janus Translated Into Music

Saturn’s co-orbital moons Janus and Epimetheus play a musical scale within the planet’s rich ring system. The moons excite spiral density waves at 'resonances' where the motion of particles in the rings harmonize with the motion of the moons. The orbital frequencies of the moons and resonances are increased by 23 octaves so that their notes can be heard by human ears. A guitar is played for every orbit of Janus and Epimetheus while a cello sustains a note for each resonance within the rings. Zooming in reveals one of the dramatic spiral density waves recently photographed by the Cassini spacecraft. The observed brightness variations of the wave are used to modulate the volume of the cello and also of a ghostly sonification of the pattern’s frequency spectrum.

For more information on how this was done visit system-sounds.com.

Created by Matt Russo, Dan Tamayo and Andrew Santaguida 2017.
Numerical simulation and moon animation performed with REBOUND (rebound.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
Ring art by Alpha-Element (alpha-element.deviantart.com)
Background image and Saturn animation created with Universe Sandbox ² (universesandbox.com)
Raw image of density wave taken by the Cassini Spacecraft (saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/raw-images)
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: Please credit system-sounds.com with all use.
 
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