Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I saw something similar, the weird thing is my brain hallucinated sound that couldn't have possibly been there. It was on dark winter night during a ferry crossing and the chunks intersected the horizon.



Not a hallucination.

Black body radiation coming off that thing that's nearly sun-hot pumps a lot of energy out into the world. Everything that can absorb some of it does so, and twitches.

We tend to think of radio receivers as something special, but they're highly optimized versions of processes going on all the time all around us.

The clearest example I've personally experienced of this was out in the boonies watching a meteor shower with an astronomy club. After a few times hearing my glasses "hiss" just as I was seeing a meteor I asked about it and the fellow in charge (chair of the college astro department) filled us in. It was freakin' awesome.


I saw one of these as well, sitting on top of a mountain with a friend. We were there to watch the Perseid meteor shower and were seeing small ones every few minutes, then a much larger one came across the sky. The head of it was glowing orange and green and I could also hear a crackling/burning noise. My friend saw the same thing and we were both so freaked out by it that we headed back to camp shortly afterwards.


A fizzing crackling sound?


Back in 2004 I saw a meteor and there was a distinct fizzy crackling sound but it was coming off the cars next to me in the car park.

Looks like it is a known thing - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4201328/Stud...


Crossed with a low frequency white noise like howl. I see "with sound" on the meteorite spotter page, but it still seems like it was made up.

Interesting, https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1932PA.....40..289W#:~:text=....

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-theory-may-expla....

So maybe not.


I'd be very surprised if that's the explanation and would rather suspect something like the "noisy GIFs"[1], where a strong visual cue may cause the brain to attach a sound that sounds reasonable.

That's also quite easy to verify - since we have visual sky surveillance, why not add microphones and confirm it really happens, no need to rely on random reports.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/noisygifs


I was on a sailing ship in the Atlantic, on the middle of the night watch, when a large meteor streaked across the sky. It burned with several colours (white, green, red, maybe, can’t remember exactly) and made a strong fizzling sound, like something in a hot frying pan with too much oil. I know that couldn’t be from the meteor’s sound waves, so this is the first sensible explanation.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: