am I understanding right, monitoring these specific radio frequencies is basically like seismology, but for lightning storms instead of earthquakes?
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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As I understand, that's a decent analogy.
They have been measured in situ only on Earth and Titan, although they are believed to exist on other planets like Mars.
4 Discussion and Conclusions The recent findings by Cardnell et al. [2016] highlighted the large conductivity differences in the Martian atmosphere depending on solar illumination. Our simulations show that dayside conditions do not allow SR to develop, while nightside conditions, presenting conductivities 2 orders of magnitude lower, do (Figure 1).
To summarize, we report numerical simulations of the SR to be expected at Mars, based on the latest modeling efforts of the Martian atmosphere-ionosphere chemical interactions and properties. The day-night asymmetry was never addressed before in SR studies at Mars, and our study highlights its importance for assessing the main SR parameters.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL071635
I wonder if this sort of data could help in the search for potentially inhabitable planets sometime in the future?
Planets that have both atmosphere and magnetic field, at least. Which could be a nice start to look for habitable.
Something that I found super interesting learning about amateur (ham) radio was that antennas don't always work "backwards" as you'd expect. From Maxwell's equations they obey reciprocity, so it stands to reason (or so I thought) that an antenna that's good at receiving is also good at transmitting.
But it's not true! It turns out that the noise floor of the environment
in part due to atmospheric stuff like lightning
is so much higher than the sensitivity of radios (well above thermal/Johnson noise) that an inefficient antenna can be a really good antenna for receiving, in certain circumstances. Namely, if a receive antenna is inefficient but has good directionality, it can be useful...but probably no good for transmission!
It's not super profound or anything, but I found it pretty interesting.
A brand of light/sound brainwave-synchronisation machine has as one of its built-in programs one titled “Schumann Resonance”, with 7.83Hz as the brainwave frequency. Not sure if that’s just a poetic coincidence or whether there’s a strain of new-age mystical woo that holds that the resonant frequencies of lightning in the Earth’s magnetosphere have a bearing on brainwaves and states of consciousness.