The Planets Are Weirdly In Sync 

You can also discuss this video on REDDIT: stvmld.com/7enfg47s I say "in other words" about 300 times in this video. But what's the alternative?! CORRECTION: In the video I say that Ganymede, Europa and Io are the largest moons are jupiter. Actually here are the 4 largest moons from largest to smallest: Ganymede Callisto Io Europa

Man, we looked at explaining the orbital resonance but thought "nah, that would take a whole other video" and here it is! Kudos to you - I get it now!

Having all the planets of a solar system line up is the celestial equivalent of the DVD logo hitting the corner of the screen

Turning the resonances in nature into musical notes an beats was one of the coolest things I’ve learned in a long time. Great video!

I realized this in High School when we had to program a realistic to-scale solar system with their correct orbits and masses and everything. It actually wasn't that hard, just time consuming to enter in all the numbers exactly. I noticed all the planets and their moons had a resonance to their orbits and revolutions, and it made me feel like I was living on a tiny gear inside of a giant clock. Sounds lame and underwhelming now but back then it was incredibly grounding and insightful to me for whatever reason.

There's literally The Rock in the gap of Saturn rings. Just brilliant visualisation.

My mind was blown several times during the duration of this video, but when you casually dropped the fact that Beardyman and Jay Foreman are brothers, I had to go for a short walk to recover.

When you played the notes on the piano at the end it would have made the old pythagoreans happy who believed in the music of the spheres. It reminded me of that antique concept

Turning planets orbits to frequencies to turn them to tones to turn them to music is EXACTLY what I did a few years ago for my own curiosity and to find by « hear » patterns that wouldn’t appear otherwise. I am glad you did a video about it. I still think that it would be beautiful to release that as some open source music. Planets do make music, actually.

didn't expect to hear the planets do a beat drop when I woke up today

You science youtubers really are on a first name basis with every other science youtubers. It's cross overs all the way down.

You just explained the so called Cosmic Octave. Planetary orbital frequencies translated by the octave into the audible range. I am producing music based on this for more than 20 years and I programmed my own calculator to convert orbital periods in musical tuning data. I saw the stickers on your piano keys and I recognized, that the colours are not in relation to the actual tonal frequencies. If you octave a tonal frequency into the visible spectrum, you get a Green for C, Blue-Green for C#, D is Blue, D# is Blue-Violet, E is Violet, F is Red-Violet and F# is actually at the beginning of the visual spectrum by being Red, G is Red-Orange, G# is Orange, A is Orange-Yellow, A# Yellow and the final key B is Yellow-Green. If you translate the orbital time into seconds and apply the formula f=1/sec you get the orbital frequency. Then apply the octave (double the frequency) until you get a tone in the middle range of audible frequencies. The earth year is a C# at 136.1 Hz, Blue-Green, the Master -Tuning is then 432.1 Hz and the octave analog tempo is 63.8 BPM. My calculator can also calculate backwards and I can type in any wavelength of light and convert it into such musical tuning data. If you check my account you will find a recent video with my live act CONSTELLATION. We performed at the Ibiza Light Festival in October 2022, where we performed a Venus concert and a Saturn concert. The gongs I am playing are also tuned to these orbital frequencies. They are so called symphonic planet gongs. The Swiss mathematician Hans Cousto discovered the cosmic octave and Jens Zygar had the idea to tune gongs to these frequencies, because symphonic gongs are one of the best ways to experience such sonic vibrations, because of their wide frequency range and especially below the audible range, so you can feel the beat. Anyway, I am happy I discovered your video today and it goes in my archive of bookmarks, because it is a nice way of explaining how to translate orbital frequencies into sound. @DrBecky I just discovered yesterday. Nice how the RU-vid algrorhythm works. Also a form of resonance. :)

I've always found it interesting that when something is drawn the same scale of a probe on Saturn's rings, the rings looked curved. Surely the rings material would look sparse and as straight as any road you've ever been on. It would be a straight line heading off into the distance with minimal chance of seeing any curve as you're not high enough off the rings and they're only 10m thick. Even at a tall height, it'd look more like a StarWars starting text written in gibberish heading directly away from you. After 1200km (thickest ring) in front of you, it'd curve inward about 1 degree. Just above the ring surface, it'd probably just look like a thin line dividing your view of the universe in half that maybe gets thicker, in front and behind.

those last minutes prior to the sponsorship part where kinda magical. i'm talking about the octave part.

I know it gets said a lot, but you have a gift in explaining this phenomenon in a way that is easy to digest, and the graphics help a lot as well. Thank you! I had no idea that orbital resonance was a thing until today!

Wow, you wrap it all up so nicely right before you give a big sigh! Wonderful. And the musical interpretation of the Trappist-1 and TOI-178 orbits was beautiful! Awsome video.

When I was at University in 1970s studying music, in medieval music history we studied the foundations of the first European Universities in Oxford, Bologna and Paris, where the learned men studied the Quadrivium, a combination of mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music. Part of their belief involved "The Harmony of the Spheres", a hypothesis that suggested music maths and astronomy were all connected by the divine relationships of the movements of the planets that corresponded to the resonance of a harmonic series. What you are now telling us is that in other star systems they would have been right!

Did you switch Jay’s and Beardyman’s names on purpose? Because, frankly, when I saw the beatboxing head, I thought “Is that Jay Foreman?”. Actually, that was when you showed it the second time; the first time, I was like “Steve’s real good at making those sound effects”.

I appreciate that you timed the animation to match your speech at 6:48. Your efforts did not go unnoticed :) haha

Oh man, you playing those notes on the piano threw me right into memories of playing outer wilds. Both showing the beauty of a solar system in their own unique way

This effect reminds me of those metronomes starting out of synch and finishing all in sync. There is always a fotce ether helping the one falling behind or slowing down the first one making them go into synch - a point where that power of helping and halting cancels out.

18:36 - Beatbox of the Spheres 20:30 - Music of the Spheres 20:56 - In the words of Adam Neely, that's one spicy chord

This was glorious. Well done. And very well explained.

that restoring mechanism to the 2-1 resonance frequency is such a lightbulb moment. I hear about orbits having the resonance but was never explained why it comes to that.

You've done some amazing work on this channel, but I have to say this one really brought back a childlike sense of wonder about the reality we inhabit. Thank you ✌️😊

The main take-away from this video - Beardy Man and Jay Foreman are brothers. Who knew? Not me ;-)

"let me just complete the circle here" -*Proceeds to compete 6pi radians of circleage, and then links a tangent to jay bloody foreman*

12.48 The tidal bulge opposite the Moon is easy to understand. Just like any two objects spinning around each other, the Earth and Moon rotate around the center of gravity (CG) also called the center of mass (CM) of the system. It's like balancing an object, the balance point is at the CG, or CM. If you hold a heavy object at arms-length and spin you will have to lean back so you are moving in a circle around the CG or CM of your body and the object. The Earth and Moon are rotating around a point 4,671 Km from the center of the Earth. What happens when a body rotates around a point? Just like a passenger in a car rounding a curve where bodies are thrown outward by a fictitious force called centrifugal force, water which is a fluid and flows, bulges on the opposite side from the Moon.

I think the thing you missed with the orbital resonance is that the system wants to find stability. 2 objects have to find resonance or one is ejected. Over time i would bet most systems naturally circularise as the centre of mass is nailed in. The thing that i find weird is some of these stars on the outer edges of galaxies would have only ever orbited their host galaxy a few times, a few in galactic terms anyway

"The three largest moons of Jupiter" *Sad Callisto noises*

Please do a whole video just about the audiofication of Data! The Last part of this video was just magical! 🤯

Solid video dude loving your content. Just a little audio tip (from a sound engineer). A bit of fiddling with a noise gate and eq on your microphone will get rid of the loud breathy noises between statements, making for much clearer, crisper sounding vocal recordings.

Really, really amazing video. The one thing I wish you did is a different way to do the last two things - instead of switching to the piano, you could have kept the "beatbox" part speeding up. You already had it speeding up - if you continued long enough you would have illustrated with sound the fact you described in words - that rhythm becomes pitch, which isn't intuitive for all folks, and is a really, really cool thing to hear.

Me, a music theorist of just intonation: "The universe is ratios you say? My friend Pythagoras is all into that, but Aristoxenus ain't so sure."

Now I understand the formation of Mimas large crater, Herschel. No one repeatedly kicks The Rock and goes w/o consequences...

This video is fantastic in explaining orbital resonances clearly to physics students! I’m gonna be using this possibly as a clip to show at our next stargazing event here at my college when we invite a speaker from SJSU to talk about the physics of music of horns. Harmonics. All we need is a short and easy lecture on Kepler’s “music of the spheres” and his Third Law to complete the bridge into astronomy. Thank you for this!

That was brilliant. Absolutely loved the translation into sound as well. I'm sure that thought's occurred to me in the past but it must have gone out my head 😁

I'm so glad you explained who Beardyman was! I was like "that guy looks so much like Jay Forman but he's not..." 😅

That was a brilliant explanation of a phenomenon I have always struggled to understand. Your skills in understanding and being able to explain difficult topics are unmatched! Well done!

Steve has such great content on this channel. Had no idea I needed to learn about resonance this way.

HOLY CARP. The orbital resonance bits I recall from university astronomy but I’ve never seen or heard these relationships relayed as MUSIC. This was fantastic. And informative. Thank you.

as a musician i really appreciate you explained it so well with the music theory, you just proved rocket science and music theory ain’t as hard as people think, you just need a fine and fun teacher😂

that little joke with "the rock" had me laughing much longer than it probably should've

I love how you shared this with an auditory example at the end. Great video!

Turning the orbits into notes brought up a childhood memory for me! I used to have a stereo, back when I was around 10-12 or so. I had a disk with it that had music for each planet of our solar system. After a bit of internet digging, I found it: Gustav Holst - The Planets It’s a suite comprised of 7 movements. Composed all the way back in 1914-17.

The parallel between orbital periods, rhythms and tones is amazing. I'm impressed.

Brilliantly explained and animated. I like that you played musical versions of the resonances. You even said "Saturn" the way Dr. Becky says it! Surely if the whole solar system was turned into music, including Pluto(!) the interval between Mercury (fastest and highest) and Pluto would be too many octaves apart. Maybe from Mercury to Jupiter or Saturn would work or from Jupiter outwards. An out of tune piano actually gives a more accurate sense of it as they are not all perfect intervals but some slightly out, which can be adjusted in audio editing by changing speed/pitch of a tone. I found if you take the square (or cube) root of the orbital periods it halves (or divides by 3) the intervals , which gets a similar effect but fits them onto the piano more easily. It could still sound sort-of harmonic. I was wondering if a many-moon system might even out or cancel out the tidal effects on the planet from all the moons so that would be another reason they would not tend to drift away. However, if they all line up when they are 'meeting' it may cause bigger tides at that time when they have all had their respective numbers of months to bring it around again. It's curious also about the day-year resonance on Mercury instead of it being tidally locked. Are there also galactic resonance effects or is it too weak to have an effect over scales of tens of thousands of light years? I suppose it could work over timescales of millions of years. I guess it would keep changing as the central black hole is growing more massive and pulling things towards it gradually over time. Maybe that is what makes spirals instead of rings. PS I just heard someone else mention the name Steve Mould on a video. I think it was Matt Parker. I had forgotten who Steve Mould was, but now I recognise the face. I have seen him on a few other videos. It seems all these science/maths RU-vidrs all know each other, unsurprisingly. When they collaborate it is double the excitement for fans of both (or all) of them.

This was fantastic. Thanks so much for doing this. I always thought that it was coincidental that it seemed like, for instance, that Mercury's year was 1/4 that of Earth's. Having the reason for it explained was terrific, and I'll be giving this to my Earth Science students. Without going into the math, is this also the reason that Bode's Law works?

The last 5 minutes of this video have me looking behind your couch for Adam Neely.

I was really hoping you'd then play the chord that most closely corresponds to our solar system and it would sound horribly discordant

Love this! Is there a particular source that's good for investigating the ratios of more planetary systems? I feel a new music project coming on :D

The audio analysis at the end was phenomenal. Thank you!

Didn't that Veritasium video come out only a few days ago? And you've already discovered a new concept, understood it, and made a video explaining it...? ..... I feel super dumb.

My dude, finding out that beardyman and Jay foreman are brothers was more mind-blowing than the rest of the video

This was sooooo incredible to watch, so well done. Loved this

Ive enjoyed lots of your vids. But really liked this one. Ever fealt like youre in the club.... Good work x

That musical/acoustic representation of orbital frequencies is just mesmerizing. You even disclaimed on equal/just intonation. Kudos! Just slightly undercut by an out of tune piano x).

Wow. It must've taken so much research and work to turn such a complicated topic into something so digestible. Great Video.

Excellent, I absolutely loved this vid. Putting it to music was brilliant. (Has anyone tried to do similar modeling with solar system, incase an unexpected pattern emerges? Where you suggesting it had no pattern?). How about the resonant frequencies of atoms and molecules? Math puzzle: When can 1+1=3? When can 1+1+1=5 (or more, etc?); overtones! Lets examine the effects of different wave shapes on overtones and undertones and show how music has much more than is obvious. (and why some stereos sound much better than others)/ So glad to have discovered you. Will be perusing your other vids as I can find time. Appreciate you, keep it up.

Wow! That musical tie in there at the end was completely from out left field. As a musician and also a live music and recording engineer, that clicked pretty loudly and clearly.

I love how we went from talking about Jupiter's moons to perfect fifths in music. In our Universe, everything is connected.

I love to listen to Dr. Becky explaining anything. She's got a great sense of humor too.

Your graphics really helped make sense of this phenomenon! Thanks.

Steve, I just found your channel and I'm in love!

I absolutely love these videos where you take something that has repeatedly been explained badly and do it properly. It's so satisfying finally hearing and understanding an explanation that actually makes sense!

Can't believe I'm seeing Beardyman in this! Been a fan of his for over a decade. He made me feel like it was cool to always try and mimic sounds like I've done since I was little.

Ok the music analogy was gold. I love music and the fact you applied that to orbital resonance made my heart skip a beat.

This is among the greatest RU-vid videos I’ve ever seen with 15 years on this site.

Thank you. I've know about orbital resonance for thirty years but never really understood how it works. Now I do. That was very interesting and just the right side of needing me to think without being incomprehensible.

This is a great presentation and explanation! Thank you! The animation is great, and the sped up to beat, then audio frequencies demonstration is cool. And thank you for the good sound quality and no annoying music or sound effects! - I find that stuff distracting from what is being said. Bravo, and cool to see Becky, too!

My favourite video so far. Do you have the paper on r = 2R part. Would like to go into more details :)

Hey, after a one year i rewatched this episode. One think comes to my mind. Do you have any source for model, simulating this (with animation preferably, or graphs). I'm wondering if the red moon can overshoot the symmetry line, and approach it kind of like dampened oscillator, or does it approach more asymptotically? My rational is that the change in angular momentum is kind of quantized, for let's say for 90% effective force it will happen over defined period of time, so this will correspond to set change in momentum Next meeting will happen in different point with different interaction time, but will it perfectly match so the red moon will approach asymptotically, or can it overshoot the symmetry line?

The amount of subjects you managed to weave into 1 video was just beautiful.

this is the most incredible video to hit youtube since tom scott's explosions series. Modelling orbital frequencies with piano chords!! you are a madman!

This is hands down the best video and one of my favorites by Steve, I have watched this thrice in entirety.

omg just watched ur video earlier on quartz watches & was thinking u could describe the flip flop chain info in a musical way so u could see (hear) the pattern so I was THRILLED when u did it with orbital resonance!! (and the literal flip flop chain was so much better)

This is the type of content that keeps me refreshing RU-vid 96 times a day!

This was transcendent. Nobel prize for explaining difficult science!

Amazing video holy hell , by the end I’m excited I followed you all the way through 😂

Wont lie. this was the easiest explanation of orbital resonance to follow that ive ever heard. Amazing! would love to see a collab between you and Nick Lucid fro The science asylum. Your practical demonstrations and his very concise and fun way of explaining stuff could come together to make an amzing video!!!!

What I learned: If we want to keep the moon, we need to create another, much larger moon in a 1:2 orbital ratio to the existing moon. Better get on that now I guess...

i've recently done a project of sofya kovalevskaya and she was one of the pioneers of the dynamics of saturn's rings, she's great!

I love how deep your understanding of music is :o Do you meddle with music on the side? We'd love to see a few videos of it :D

This video is absolutely fascinating. Really thorough and well explained

I love it when two different fields of science come together to explain reality. Astrophysics and beatboxing.

This is mind-blowing. We've been studying equilibrium in my chemistry class, and the extent of similarity between these concepts, down to the restoring mechanism and Le Chatelier's Principle, is incredible

Incredible video, you are very good at explaining everything!

21:11 *Tenet theme plays* honestly this concept feels as complicated to understand as Tenet, but the video explanation made it sound so easy

Really cool realization of the sonification of solar resonance! Loved the animation right at the end where you removed the tones as you removed the image of the moon. Great content!

Having been working on a 3D model of the solar system (which, apart from being subscribed to your channel is probably why this showed up in my feed) this (the knowledge) is honestly kind of like "duh" to me now. But rewinding back to before I was working on it, I never really was interested in any of it at all. This was our backyard, things were way much interesting beyond the fence. But having now studied all of this: it really is amazing. And hearing you putting it into music makes it even more amazing.

How have I only just discovered this Channel! Excellent videos mate!

So, all orbital resonate come from extra help like the extra gravity of the one to the interaction of the one which that one will go fast or not, so the people that walk at the same time on the bridge in full will cause the bridge to crash, so all walk at same time to affect the bridge to cause push that is up and down. Since the people and the bridge interact at different time base the bridge is stable and the people are in motion so the stable will interact the motion so stable will be altered into motion, so differences will cause reactions that resonate, so the differences can't be too different so for sameness to happen to require two different times that will become parallel since the radius of both is different. So, it doesn't have to be gravity but different times of radius that will meet, so how long does each meet for the planet to moon and planet to planet?? How long per month to per year?

3:45 The Rock 😁

Great Vid Steve as always, I was just caught of guard when in the ending sequence the planets dissapear outer orbit to inner but the frequency becomes lower. Shouldn't the tones be "speeding up" because the frequency of the closest planet is highest? Am I being nitpicky or did I misunderstand something? :)

It would be cool to see your explanation using space/time transformation instead of force mechanics. Since gravity is not a force I guess that the moons space/time change and affects each other. I have not seen a good visualisation of that yet, but in my mind it could look really cool!

Thank you very much for your clear and comical videos about physics problems. I have a question. Do you know how long it takes for all the planets, including Pluto, to be in exactly the same position as their position today?

19:32 This video has some good trolls in it, but the name switch is so obviously on purpose. :-D I like it! You can feel the influence of the two brothers...

I simply see that elliptic movement in gravity represents a pulse, whilst circular orbit represents continuous stream. Pulses can sync where continuous streams don't necessarily provide a similar structure when they're in synchronicity. they just simply are flowing parallel and thus cancel

Amazing stuff....Always thought I know about this stuff by learned it in a easier way today..... Thanks

Man I wish I had a guy like him to teach me when I was in college.