Nature’s Electromagnetic Symphony – Whistlers

I love the topic of giant electromagnetic phenomena.

Fun topics related to whistlers: STEVE travels at about 3 miles/second and was recently discovered, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_(atmospheric_phenomeno...

Also, for some reason the human brain emits EM waves with wavelengths about the diameter of the earth: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4970

I studied these a bit during my PhD. The focus of my research was gravitational wave (GW) astronomy which involves incredibly sensitive instrumentation. The history of GWs before 2015 contained notoriously dubious detection claims and we were concerned with ruling out any possible factor that could influence our measurements. The way statistical significance is calculated in the field, any effects that could influence multiple geographically-spaced GW detectors within the speed-of-light travel time are especially pernicious. That these exotic EM phenomena could potentially mimic the time-frequency signature of a binary black hole was especially troubling. I built a monitoring system to record ambient RF signals and compared it to the GW signals. Wideband RF monitoring is actually a pretty difficult problem, and in the back of my mind I was always scared I missed something, until the neutron star signal GW170817 put all doubts to rest.

Imagine picking up similar emissions from a planet orbiting a different star, which is what I believe they did at Cornell

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/12/cornell-postdoc-det...