When researchers launched solar-powered balloons up 70,000 feet into Earth's stratosphere, they detected a hidden acoustic world — including mysterious noises without a known origin.
The noises are “infrasound,” inaudible to the human ear — just as light in the infrared spectrum is invisible to the human eye. When recorded with specialized instruments and sped up a few thousand times, they sound like muffled, staticky whispers.
Some sounds picked up by the balloons have a clear source; a low murmur, similar to the sighing heard when a seashell is cradled to your ear, is the distant sound of“We spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about what things are,” said Siddharth Krishnamoorthy, a research technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory“I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now, and, you know, the fact that there’s mysterious sounds that I don’t understand is troubling, but it’s not like a revelation,”...
Understanding the sounds is more than an intellectual pursuit. Scientists launching balloons on Earth want to use our planet as a test bed for interpreting balloon-based recordings so we can one day send similar balloons to study other worlds.Floating balloons into Earth’s stratosphere turns out to be a surprisingly low-tech enterprise.
Bowman constructs solar-powered hot-air balloons using ordinary materials found at a hardware store: sheets of painters’ plastic and shipping tape, with charcoal powder sprinkled inside. To avoid his creations’ being mistaken foror interfering with aircraft, he gives the Federal Aviation Administration a heads-up about his experiments.
The sun heats the air inside the balloon, making it less dense than the outside air, and away it goes. The balloon reaches the stratosphere before the sun sets, when the change in temperature causes it to descend. The balloons go wherever the wind blows them — one traveled all the way from central New Mexico to the outskirts of Houston.Bowman initially got interested in using balloons to measure volcanic eruptions in spots on Earth that don’t have great surveillance.
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