This is what lightning on Mars sounds like
Nature Podcast
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4.4 • 859 Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
00:46 Martian ‘micro-lightning’
The sounds of ‘micro-lightning’ have been recorded by NASA’s Perseverance rover, ending a long search for the phenomenon on Mars. A lack of suitable equipment has made it difficult to gather evidence of lightning on the red planet, but a team of researchers realized that a microphone on Perseverance should be able to pick up the characteristic sounds of electrical discharges. In total they found 55 such examples, along with signs of electrostatic interference indicative of the phenomenon. They dubbed the electric bursts ‘micro-lightning’, as they are far smaller than the lighting seen on Earth, due to the thin Martian atmosphere. The team believe this finding could help better understand Martian chemistry and how best to design equipment to explore the planet’s surface.
Research Article: Chide et al.
News and Views: Is there lightning on Mars?
11:03 Research Highlights
How the biology of male seahorses’ brood pouches appears similar to mammalian pregnancy— plus, why Neanderthals’ jaws were so beefy.
Research Highlight: The origin of male seahorses’ brood pouch
Research Highlight: Neanderthal DNA reveals how human faces form
13:36 The key takeaways from COP30
The UN’s climate conference, COP30, came to a close last week in Brazil. Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson tells us what was and wasn’t agreed during the final negotiations.
Nature: What happened at COP30? 4 science take-homes from the climate summit
22:27 Why women may retract less than men
A new analysis suggests that female authors retract fewer medical science papers than their male counterparts. Women are known to be underrepresented in the medical sciences, but even accounting for this an AI-tool revealed that female authors featured on far fewer retracted research articles. Reporter Jenna Ahart has been investigating and told us why this might be, and what it means for research more broadly.
Nature: Women seem to retract fewer papers than men — but why?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | nature in an experiment i don't know yet why is it like so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea |
| 0:10.7 | but now the data's i find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature |
| 0:21.6 | welcome back to the nature podcast. |
| 0:26.4 | This time, micro lightning heard on Mars. |
| 0:31.1 | And what was agreed at the COP 30 climate conference. |
| 0:35.3 | I'm Benjamin Thompson. |
| 0:36.4 | And I'm Nick Petichau. |
| 0:37.7 | Lightning. This dramatic phenomenon continues to pose problems to researchers. |
| 0:57.7 | We don't know much about how it starts and propagates, for example. |
| 0:59.5 | And that's just here on Earth. |
| 1:02.2 | On other planets, even less is known. |
| 1:05.5 | We've seen evidence of lightning on Jupiter, for example, |
| 1:10.2 | but closer to Earth, on Mars, there's never been compelling evidence. |
| 1:12.5 | Well, perhaps until now. |
| 1:16.5 | So, low in frequency, you hear the rumble of the wind. |
| 1:22.3 | And then in the middle of the recording, you hear a loud noise. |
| 1:26.7 | You know, as if you unplug the jack cable of your speaker, you know? |
| 1:31.7 | This sound is basically the sound of the discharge. |
| 1:38.7 | This is Baptiste Schidd, a planetary acoustician describing the sounds of mini lightning recorded by a microphone on the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. |
| 1:45.9 | Now, as you may be able to hear, this is quite unlike the sound of lightning we're |
| 1:50.3 | familiar with on Earth, and that's for good reason. It is quite different to Earth lightning. |
| 1:56.3 | Baptiste calls it microscale lightning, as these discharges are only millimeters to centimeters in length, |
... |
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