Initially, these scientists just wanted to explore the stratosphere, but it occurred to them to put infrasound recorders on them. The result: They caught strange noises at more than 21,000 meters above sea level. What was heard?
It happened in the United States, and what was recorded was presented before the Acoustic Society of the country. Daniel Bowman, Principal Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories from New Mexico, was in charge of the experiment.
“Nobody had tried to bug stratospheric balloons in half a century, so we went on to explore what this new platform could do,” Bowman said. quoted by CNN.
Below, we can listen to the audio released by Bowman and his colleagues during the scientific event. The mystery is in the origin of the noise. Which may be?
Bowman was accompanied by Jonathan Lees (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Sarah Albert, geophysics from Sandia National Laboratories.
The experiment with balloons and microphones in the stratosphere
Using giant solar globes, They reached 21,336 meters high. The stratosphere, the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, has the ozone layer at its lower level, scattering ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
Serves as space maximum altitude for jet aircraft and weather balloons.
In the area “there are mysterious signals of infrasound that are produced a few times per hour on some flights, but its origin is completely unknown”, explains Bowman.
It is not the first time that Bowman has launched balloons into the stratosphere. He has been doing it since 2016, and the longest to date It lasted 44 days, one belonging to NASA and with helium inside.
According to the researcher, “there are many flights with signals whose origin we do not understand. They are almost certainly mundane, perhaps a patch of turbulence, a distant severe storm, or some kind of human object, like a freight train. But sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going on, because of the lack of data up there.”
