Academic Papers – Pluto research

I’ve read a number of academic papers so far during the course of my research on Pluto and the music of the spheres.

The first one, titled Waves in Pluto’s Upper Atmosphere, is about the observation of gravity waves in, you guessed it, Pluto’s upper atmosphere. Gravity waves sound more complicated then they are. They’re simply waves through a fluid or air, or at the points where these mediums meet. All waves are effected by gravity. One example we all know are the tides, influenced by the gravity of the moon. Small ripples in water (capillary waves), up to large currents of energy in the atmosphere are forms of gravity waves. In this paper they used the light from a star behind Pluto, that traveled through Pluto’s atmosphere, to detect gravity waves in the upper atmosphere. The waves caused the light curving around Pluto from the star to change suddenly. The waves suggest that Pluto’s atmosphere is increasing, something that is predicted to happen as frozen gas on the surface melts when Pluto’s orbit gets closer to the sun.

The second paper is titled Orbital Resonances and Chaos in the Solar System. This is quite interesting. Resonances are a phenomenon where orbiting bodies enter into a proportional relationship with each other, and their gravities effect each other. What does this mean? Lets take a swing for an example. If you push someone in a swing at the same cycle that the swing is swinging the overall energy of the swing is doubled. Conversely, if someone is swinging themselves in the swing, they have to work twice as hard to get the swing to increase speed. This type of in phase relationship can happen on the solar system level as well. Pluto and Neptune have such a relationship. They are in a 3/2 proportional orbit, and their orbital paths cross over each other. Pluto takes 264 years to orbit the sun, while Neptune takes 165 years. 264/165 is 3/2: Neptune will make 3 revolutions around the sun for every 2 Pluto makes. When planets have small numbers in their proportional orbits like this, and they are close enough to each other, their respective gravities can influence, and even create resonances with each other. Pluto’s orbital path overlaps Neptune’s orbital path, but they will never run into each other because their resonance with each other has stabilized them out. Resonances don’t always stabilize out like Pluto and Neptune though. They can cause the motion to become more unstable and chaotic. It’s really fascinating that when such large scale energies become proportionally a-tuned with each other they can at times both cause stability and chaos.

The third paper, titled Augmenting the Acoustic Piano with ElectromagneticString Actuation and Continuous Key Position Sensing, is about using electromagnets to vibrate the strings of a piano. This is the technique I propose to use in the Pluto installation. Typically, electromagnetic vibration of instrument strings works by having two electromagnets, one that picks up the frequency of the string as it vibrates, and the other which vibrates the string at that same frequency in sort of a feedback loop. With a piano, this can become very expensive, very fast, due to the about 230 strings a normal piano has. What was developed and explained in this paper is a fascinating technique of having just one contact mic on the metal frame that the strings are attached to, to pickup the sum total of all the frequencies of the strings playing at any given moment. The component frequencies are then isolated via computer and sent to the appropriate electromagnets to vibrate the proper strings. Crazy!