from the OK-but-I-wouldn't-buy-the-album dept.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
The Sound of Earth Being Wracked by a Solar Storm Is Eerily Disturbing
In space, no one can hear you scream because sound can't travel in a vacuum. But if we convert electromagnetic activity to sound, it suddenly becomes a very noisy place. And our Earth is no exception; specifically, in and around the magnetic field generated by Earth's molten core.
This barrier, called a magnetosphere, is thought to be one of the vital ingredients for a life-supporting planet, protecting us from the harsh radiation of the solar wind. And the stronger the wind, the louder the magnetosphere sings.
As charged particles from the solar wind stream towards the magnetosphere, some are reflected from the shock region in front of the magnetic field back towards the Sun. This 'backsplash' then interacts with the solar wind that's still streaming in, generating instabilities in the plasma and resulting in magnetoacoustic waves.
Scientists on Earth then translate these magnetoacoustic waves into sound - strange chirps and whistles - to understand the dynamics of interactions between the solar wind and the magnetosphere.
Now, for the first time, the song of Earth and Sun has been recorded during a solar storm, when the solar wind blows at its most wild and fierce out into space.
Four Earth-orbiting spacecraft collectively known as the Cluster mission, conducted by the European Space Agency, sampled six solar storms from the foreshock - the region upstream of Earth's bow shock, where the solar wind first lashes up against Earth's magnetosphere.
Audio files of those electromagnetic waves reveal that the waves in the magnetosphere created by a solar storm are much more complex than previously thought.
"Our study reveals that solar storms profoundly modify the foreshock region," said physicist Lucile Turc of the University of Helsinki in Finland, who led an international team of researchers. "It's like the storm is changing the tuning of the foreshock."
First Observations of the Disruption of the Earth's Foreshock Wave Field During Magnetic Clouds, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2019GL084437)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:56AM
You guys are getting lazy ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:08AM (1 child)
A hot noisy gaseous ball of orange plasma can definitely be eerie and disturbing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @06:02AM
You say that like it's a bad thing.
RIP MDC.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:22AM
It's just some old Beatles stuff