Volunteers Discover Rare Space Weather Events Using Their Ears

Our planet rests in a magnetic cocoon filled with plasma, but it is not always peaceful and calm. The Sun’s activity can send waves through this space, and some of these disturbances can even reach Earth, affecting our power grid.

Scientists are working to understand exactly how these waves behave, and the team behind NASA’s Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas (HARP) citizen science project is approaching this problem in a unique way: They liken Earth’s magnetic field to a giant harp in space. The HARP team translated the magnetic field measurements into sound. This translation allowed HARP volunteers to use their ears to study a particular type of plasma wave that plays a role in space weather. What they heard surprised everyone.

The science team expected lower frequencies farther from Earth and higher frequencies closer to it. But when they read data from NASA’s THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) mission, the volunteers noticed something unexpected. Some plasma waves revealed the opposite pattern: lower tones near Earth and higher tones further away.

HARP volunteers were excited to help discover this anomaly, which will help scientists better understand geomagnetic storms. One volunteer said of the HARP project: “I only signed up for this group because my friend was in it, but now I think I’m going to change my major to physics – it was just so cool. » These results now appear in a new article in Frontiers of astronomy and space sciencesnces.

Thanks to all of the HARP volunteers who helped develop the project’s audio analysis protocol, beta test the graphical user interface, and identify and label the myriad plasma waves that the team will study in the years to come.

The HARP project was sponsored by NASA and continues to be sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The project is no longer actively seeking volunteers.