Listen to the sound of lightning on Mars

With science currently under attack, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still some pretty incredible work being done. The Perseverance rover has been driving around Mars since 2021, taking samples to – hopefully – be returned to Earth for analysis, and collecting hordes of data about the red planet.

The latest amazing discovery made possible by Perseverance is the first evidence of lightning on Mars. In the recently published paper, researchers described finding the sound of “triboelectric discharges” or micro-lightning, hidden in a serendipitously obtained audio recording.

In the latest episode of the Nature podcast, Baptiste Chide, planetary acoustician and lead author of the paper, describes the crackling sounds discovered in a recording of Martian wind. The sound can be heard at 5:41 in the podcast. While the sound may not seem as exciting as the loud crash of a lightning strike on Earth, remember that it is a recording of lightning on another planet 140 million miles away.

Perserverance will keep finding amazing things; we just need to keep listening.