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Heavy metal on Titan

WOULD you like to know what Deep Purple sound like playing on Saturn’s moon Titan?

No, the band hasn’t actually been there, and nor has a recording of its work been dropped onto Titan to be broadcast back to Earth. However, physicist Andi Petculescu at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and mechanical engineer Richard Lueptow of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have developed a model that predicts the acoustic properties of gas mixtures. They then played the opening bars of Deep Purple’s classic track Smoke on the Water through filters that mimic the different atmospheric…

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