Sky Sounds

Project overview

When meteoroids enter the atmosphere, their temperature to rises sharply due to friction. Between 80 and 100 kilometers above the Earth, the temperature of the meteoroid is so high that it leads to its ablation and sublimation. This causes a trail of free electrons that reflects the radio waves of specific frequencies. The reflection of a radio signal from a meteor wake can be detected by a radio station.

The Contadores de Estrellas citizen science project has an infrastructure of two radio stations. These stations are in Madrid and Extremadura and monitor the signal of the GRAVES radar, located near Dijon, France, which emits at 143,050 MHz uninterruptedly. This beacon has been used in recent years for all kinds of wave propagation experiments, including meteor detection and moon bounce. Each radio station is fitted with a Yagi antenna, an SDR receiver, and a PC. With this configuration, thanks to an open-source program, the spectrogram and the sound associated with each detection are generated.

These stations have been built and tested by enthusiasts of the Agrupación Astronómica de Madrid Sur and members of the Grupo Kepler. The UPM and the IAC began collaborating with these two entities in February 2019 and a joint line of work was established to have a network of stations and a centralized solution for sharing the collected data.

Given the scope of the Contadores de Estrellas project, a new opportunity has arisen: to study meteor detections and classify them. There are no similar studies lately and it is a very promising alternative to visual observation because it is not necessary to have good sky conditions. The project has an infrastructure in which each station is detecting around 200 meteors per day. This is beginning to be a fairly large number of samples for an astronomer to sort through daily. For this reason, the idea is to make use of citizen science once again: it will be the citizens who will classify the detections and the scientists who will validate and analyze the results.

Nowadays meteors are mainly known among the public because of the well-known meteor showers that appear in the media, such as Perseids in summer and Geminids in winter. Little is explained about this phenomenon beyond encouraging people to watch them because of their beauty or romanticism. In Sky Sounds, the aim is to publicize the meteor showers from a scientific point of view and to try to awaken the interest of citizens, especially of the youngest ones, in astronomy.

On the other hand, in recent decades science is increasingly trying to encourage the participation of citizens, both in the design of research and in the data collection process. One of the causes that have made this possible is the development of mobile technologies. Nowadays, practically all students use the Internet daily as a tool to support their studies, mainly through their mobile phones. Following this line of thought, we want to encourage citizens to use these technologies to help scientists in such an important problem as the study of our Solar System.

Scientific motivation

The number of meteors falling per unit of time, that is, how many meteors fall per hour, is what is known as the shower activity. This data is very useful because it will tell us about the density of meteoroids in the orbit of the asteroid or comet. Therefore, it is necessary for each meteor shower to know its activity, but also to know it over a long period of time, covering 3 or 4 days before and 3 or 4 days after the maximum. In this way, even if the theoretical calculations failed, it would be possible to know if the shower was earlier or later. And this is important, first because it will give us information of the density in that meteor tube, but it will also give us information of the width of that tube and ideas of where that asteroid or comet is leaving the particles.

It is also interesting to know the magnitude of the meteors and, for that reason, it is necessary to classify the different detections in order to analyze the showers from another approach.

In order to perform this type of study globally across the planet, the best way is to do it with the help of citizen science.

About radio observations of meteors

Radio observation of meteors is a very novel technique to study these objects, widely known as shooting stars. One of the advantages of radio observation is that it allows us to capture the echoes of meteors during the day, whether it is raining or cloudy. These conditions, which are obviously not conducive to visual observation of this phenomenon, are still the usual way to study them nowadays.

At present there are still great doubts about the Solar System and the nearly 40 annual meteor showers are still being analyzed, mainly by counting meteors through observers. Sky Sounds hopes to provide a better understanding of these minor bodies, to classify them based on general features, such as size or shape, and to look for similar patterns.

The project is expected to result in a classification of these meteors and will be compared with those already published in scientific articles.

Open Data

All collected data are accessible to anyone who wants to use them for study and research from our website: https://chatbots.ieef.upm.es/svo/ in FITS, VOTable and ASCII tables formats.

Accessibility

Sky Sounds wants to continue making astronomy accessible to people with visual impairments. To this end, as part of the project, a very innovative tool will be developed to automate an intelligent conversation. Thus, these people will be able to classify the sounds of the echoes while maintaining a conversation in natural language. These tools, known as chatbots, make use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms that can recognize speech and understand what people are talking about. Moreover, the chatbot will make it possible to gamify the application to make it more appealing and accessible to a younger audience. On the one hand, those children who do not yet know how to read and write will be able to help without a support person and, on the other hand, the idea of "helping scientists while talking to a machine" will be much more enjoyable for children of any age.

Consciousness raising

Lastly, with this project, we want to make society aware of the importance of having a clear sky, free of air and light pollution, and, on the other hand, of building and adapting educational facilities considering the needs of children and people with disabilities. These are some of the goals set by the UN in Agenda 2034 to improve people's lives. The project will be aligned with these Sustainable Development Goals (SDAs) as will be communicated in the project communications.

Research team

The scientific team is composed by astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) led by Miquel Serra-Ricart.