Help discover the sounds of space played by NASA’s HARP

Earth’s magnetic atmosphere is full of a symphony of sound that we can not hear. Throughout our planet, ultralow-frequency waves compose a cacophonous operetta portraying the dramatic relationship between Earth and the sun.

Now, a brand new citizen science mission known as HARP—or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas—has turned these once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes. Early exams have already made shocking finds, and citizen scientists can be part of the journey of sonic space exploration to decipher the cosmic vibrations that assist sing the tune of the sun and Earth.

“What excites me most concerning the HARP mission is the power for citizen scientists to make new discoveries in heliophysics analysis by means of audio evaluation,” mentioned the mission’s principal investigator, Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist on the Area Science Institute in Colorado. “We want their assist to know complicated patterns within the near-Earth space atmosphere.”

Between Earth and the sun, space just isn’t really empty however is full of a soup of charged particles known as plasma. This plasma comes from the sun, pumped out in a gentle stream known as the solar wind and sporadically blasted away in explosive solar eruptions. When this solar plasma strikes Earth, it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma round Earth to vibrate just like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves.

In 2007, NASA launched 5 satellites to fly by means of Earth’s magnetic “harp”—its magnetosphere—as a part of the THEMIS mission (Time Historical past of Occasions and Macroscale Interactions throughout Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of details about plasma waves throughout Earth’s magnetosphere.

“THEMIS can pattern the entire harp,” Hartinger mentioned, “and it has been on the market a very long time, so it has collected lots of knowledge.”

The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to listen to, nevertheless. So the HARP staff sped them as much as convert them to sound waves. Through the use of an interactive tool developed by the staff, you possibly can pay attention to those waves and pick attention-grabbing options you hear within the sounds.

“The method of figuring out new options by means of deep listening feels a bit like treasure searching,” mentioned Robert Alexander, a HARP staff member from Auralab Applied sciences in Michigan. “I am excited for people all over the world to get a style of this expertise by means of the HARP mission.”

Based on the staff, people are sometimes higher at choosing out attention-grabbing wave patterns by ear than by eye—and might even do higher than computer systems at figuring out complex patterns that emerge throughout excessive solar occasions.

“The human sense of listening to is an incredible instrument,” mentioned HARP staff member Martin Archer of Imperial Faculty London. “We’re primarily skilled from start to acknowledge patterns and pick totally different sound sources. We are able to innately do some fairly loopy evaluation that outperforms even a few of our most superior laptop algorithms.”

HARP was impressed by an earlier sonification mission led by Archer known as MUSICS (Magnetospheric Undulations Sonified Incorporating Citizen Scientists). When Archer requested highschool college students in London to take heed to sonified knowledge (measurements transformed into sound) from Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Affiliation (NOAA) satellites, they recognized a brand new plasma wave sample associated to solar storms.

“London high school students have been ready to pick a fancy however repeatable sample within the sound that the automated strategies missed,” Hartinger mentioned. “HARP goes to take this to a brand new stage working with a a lot bigger dataset from NASA’s THEMIS mission and with a a lot bigger on-line viewers.”

There’s a bonus to having a large and various group of individuals take heed to the sounds, the staff says.

“Everybody hears the world in another way,” defined Emmanuel Masongsong of the College of California, Los Angeles, who’s a HARP staff member and a member of NASA’s THEMIS mission. “Each participant will react uniquely to the vibrations in space. What one individual ignores, one other could also be drawn to instantly. We wish individuals to find issues that we by no means thought of, or that laptop algorithms wouldn’t be capable to detect. That is how discoveries are made!”

Preliminary investigations with HARP have already began revealing sudden options, similar to what the staff calls a “reverse harp”—frequencies altering within the reverse method than what scientists anticipated.

“HARP has the potential to seek out issues that we weren’t anticipating, which is de facto thrilling,” Archer said.

HARP may additionally present insights about phenomena that different NASA citizen scientists have encountered, similar to sounds heard by beginner radio operators taking part within the HamSCI mission, or wave-like auroras examined by means of the Aurorasaurus mission.

“Information sonification supplies human beings with a possibility to understand the naturally occurring music of the cosmos,” mentioned Alexander. “We’re listening to sounds which are actually out of this world, and for me that is the following neatest thing to floating in a spacesuit.”

To begin exploring these sounds, go to the HARP website.