Sun Music

First posted on 06-22-2010

The sun warms our planet, helps plants and trees grow, and it plays a big part in determining the seasons. We are learning to harness its energy and we celebrate its setting as well as its dawning the next day. But who knew the sun also produced music?

A group of experts at the United Kingdom’s University of Sheffield have recorded and studied musical sounds created by the sun’s vibrations. Their discoveries shed new light on the sun’s magnetic atmosphere.

The sounds result from the movement of giant magnetic loops within the solar corona, the mysterious and least understood outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere. The research team was able to capture this harmonious music on tape. Studying the music’s decay has resulted in unprecedented insight as to the corona’s physics.

The solar corona is filled with huge magnetic structures called coronal loops. These structures are banana-shaped and can be one to two hundred thousand miles long. They have been observed in both an oscillating motion similar to a plucked guitar string, and oscillations similar to a wind instrument being played. These vibrations mean that the sun’s atmosphere is constantly swaying to the music of coronal loops.

Scientists aren’t just rocking to the beat. They are using sound information to discover more about the physical processes of the sun. Coronal music allows researchers to more deeply explore how the sun produces the energy we see as light and feel as warmth, particularly how energy is created to heat the sun’s outer atmosphere to millions of degrees.

The cosmic tunes were an added bonus.