The first time I would play some of these sounds back for a research scientist, and something that had always been a line on the screen was suddenly filling the room with this explosive sound… And when we listen to it, it sounds like an explosion. Rather than just plotting it and looking at it, we can also listen to this eruption of particles. HOST PADI BOYD: Robert… translates it into sound. Traditionally we would look at that, and it would be a line that would just kind of boop, it would go up and come back down. Most scientists turn data about its explosive activity into charts and graphs… Our nearest star is a dynamic and turbulent one. He’s a data sonification specialist that studies the heliosphere, our sun’s sphere of influence in space. HOST PADI BOYD: This is Robert Alexander. Every now and then, these magnetic field lines will kind of get twisted up and they’ll no longer be able to keep their hold to the surface of the sun, and they’ll go flying out into space.Īnd when this happens, when we get something like a coronal mass ejection…the amount of material that leaves the sun is oftentimes greater than the entire mass of the planet Earth. But then it gets caught on a magnetic field line and pulled back down to the surface of the Sun. We’ll see things like material from the surface of the sun that wants to extend outward into interplanetary space.

HOST PADI BOYD: Hi Curious Universe listeners. Learn how you can join heliophysicist Mike Hartinger and sonification specialist Robert Alexander in listening to Earth’s “magnetic harp” in a new NASA citizen science initiative. Through a process called data sonification, heliophysicists are using NASA satellites like audio recorders to listen to the electromagnetic symphony our Sun plays on the strings of Earth’s magnetic field, and making new discoveries along the way. What does space sound like? It’s a question that has fascinated composers and scientists alike throughout history.

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