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What a solar storm sounds like

1 decade 1 year 8 months 2 weeks ago

You've probably seen what a solar storm looks like, but what does this activity sound like? Now a new soundtrack created by composer Robert Alexander from University of Michigan in Ann Arbor translates readings from a recent storm on 7 March into audio.

To create the track, Alexander used raw data from instruments on two NASA spacecraft, the Messenger satellite near Mercury and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) about a million miles from Earth. Measurements from the Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS), for example, were mapped onto an audio waveform, the amplitude of the sound corresponding to the number of particles hitting the detector and its frequency relating to how fast the events occur. Using a standard audio sampling rate, the information was condensed into just a fraction of a second's worth of sound. The playback speed was then extended using algorithms.

Transforming data into audio could be useful for zipping through a large amount of information. Alexander is now working with a team from the Solar Heliospheric Research Group at the University of Michigan to look for patterns that wouldn't normally be visible from graphs. "When I began listening to plasma speed data, I uncovered several periodic features relatively quickly," he says. "After doing some research I was able to attribute them to well-documented events."