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Re: (meteorobs) "Electrophonic" Fireball sound nonsense
Certainly some meteors may produce sounds, in the direct acoustical sense of an energetic object falling through the lower atmosphere, but I am saying that these "electrophonic" sounds that are claimed to be produced simultaneously with the light flash and somehow "detected" by people without radios is nonsense.
Simply doing a back-of-envelope calculation will make it clear this is ridiculous. Assuming a big fireball produces maybe 100kW of RF power briefly (I doubt it would be that high anyway), at a distance of 60km this would be just 0.0002uW/cm^2. The ambient background RF exposure is estimated to be around 0.003uW/cm^2. (Mantiply, 1997) Thats the stuff we all are exposed to everyday from the radio waves from earth and space. So how can these reports claim to be detecting signals less than 1/10th of the background levels? So, I would like someone to explain how these weak signals are being picked up by "detectors" swamped by background?
Not to mention the RF near cell towers is 1-10uW/cm^2 and the 800-900Mhz cell phone standard (ANSI/IEEE) is 579uW/cm^2. Why are we not bombarded by people reporting hearing buzzing and whistling from their teeth or glasses whenever they use their portable phones? I havent heard of any such reports, where the RF levels are a million times higher than from meteors!!
Mike Linnolt
--- "Dr. Tony Phillips" <phillips@spacescience.com> wrote:
> There are legitimate disagreements about the causes
> of meteor sounds, and
> whether all of them we hear about are truly real.
> Meteor sounds, however,
> are not nonsense.
> At 05:09 PM 8/14/2002 -0400, Dale wrote:
> >i do not normally post and i realize that michael
> is an old-hand here
> >however, it is known that dental work, for example,
> can and has acted as an
> >rf detector for am radio stations
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