Day 88, Comet Shoemaker-Levy collision with Jupiter

Intrigued by the impending collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in July 1994 we decided to see if we could hear emission radiation after the impact.  We had a radio scanner.  We needed a suitable antenna.

We spent hours researching various suitable constructions.  We built a few different designs.  We spoke to a Professor at the University of Sheffield who even offered us kit to attempt to listen with - we'd seen his name in The Guardian and so just visited him on the off chance.

The most glamorous of our radio wave receiving devices and the first one we tried.

The reflecting space-listener

The best time to listen would be during hours of darkness when the atmosphere was less likely to shield us from the frequency range we were after.  We carried our various bits of kit up to Weston Park.  Avoiding the gaze of the various gentlemen that were doing late-night slow circuits of the paths we set up our first receiving device.

Our big, square, reflecting space-listener was tried first.  It was carefully constructed from a square piece of board, a reflective material (tin foil), spacers to mount the receiver wire on, and the wire itself connected to a length of co-axial cable.  This was the most time consuming to construct of our devices, and it was by far and away the most rubbish.

Our best result was using a 70 metre long length of coated wire.  We tied one end to a stick an lobbed it as high as we could into a tree.  We then unrolled as much wire as we could and connected up our scanner in our position not far from the band stand.

We swore blind that we heard a gentle and slow pulse of a whooshing sound.  This could of course have been the gentle background noise of the gradual heat death of the Universe.  The advice was that we should be listening at the top end of the UHF band.  The wavelengths where the key reactions were were we should have been listening on were about 2, 6, 8, and 11cm, and although our scanner was good it wasn't suited to that range.

After a couple of hours we packed up and left, unsure whether the sounds we heard were the ones we were expecting.  Listening to other recordings later it was possible to convince ourselves that we almost, quite possibly, might have heard something that could be interpreted as that of something not totally unrelated to post-impact cometary sound.

Maybe.