Between Earth and the Sun, space is not truly empty but is filled with a soup of charged particles called plasma. This plasma comes from the Sun, pumped out in a steady stream called 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 around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves.

In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp” – its magnetosphere – as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth’s magnetosphere. 

The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So a NASA citizen science project called HARP – or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas – has sped up the waves recorded by THEMIS to convert them to sound waves.

In this clip from March 17-20, 2012, whistle sounds are repeatedly heard over ambient background whooshes and crunches. The whistles change in pitch as a THEMIS spacecraft moves toward and away from Earth on three orbits, with a maximum altitude of about 50,000 miles. These sounds are related to Earth’s magnetic harp, which has longer magnetic strings and lower pitches farther away from Earth. These three orbits happened near the end of a geomagnetic storm when the solar wind was blowing past Earth with speeds up to about 1,300,000 miles per hour, which is fast even by solar wind standards! There’s often more harp activity during fast solar wind conditions and geomagnetic storms. At the same time, many other types of magnetic vibrations occur during geomagnetic storms, most of which sound like background whooshes and crunches.

Multiple Passes through the Magnetospheric Harp on March 17-20, 2012

Messier 104 (M104 for short), located about 28 million light-years from Earth, is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo cluster. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is angled nearly edge-on allowing a view of its bright core and spiral arms wrapped around it. Spitzer's infrared view of M104 shows a ring of dust circling the galaxy that pierces through the obscuring dust in Hubble’s optical light image. Spitzer also sees an otherwise hidden disk of stars within the dust ring. The Chandra X-ray image shows hot gas in the galaxy and point sources that are a mixture of objects within M104 as well as quasars in the background. The Chandra observations show that diffuse X-ray emission extends over 60,000 light years from the center of the M104. (The galaxy itself spans 50,000 light years across.) In sonifying these data, we can listen to each type of light either separately or together. Either option begins at the top and scans toward the bottom of the image. The brightness controls the volume and the pitch, meaning the brightest sources in the image are the loudest and highest frequencies. The data from the three telescopes are mapped to different types of sounds. The X-rays from Chandra sound like a synthesizer, Spitzer’s infrared data are strings, and optical light from Hubble has bell-like tones. The core of the galaxy, its dust lanes and spiral arms, and point-like X-ray sources are all audible features in the sonification of these data.

M104 Sonification

Shanyio 
Veacul unei clipe
Sloow Tapes - CS 40

Arise from the slumber of vegetable earth into translucent timeless nowhere clouded forests and drink from the crystal fountains of Uejima Onitsura. Shanyio weaves the tongues of Romania and Japan into a wondrous expansion and contraction of dulcimer, zither, psaltery, kantele etc. Edition of 70 copies.

Shanyio -  Veacul unei clipe

STS-135: Landing Commander Comments

This is a greeting to the universe that was electronically placed on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

English Translation: "May all be very well"

Golden Record: Akkadian Greeting

A recording recently rediscovered in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory audio archives comes from Project Relay, an early satellite communications project. Relay, managed by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, involved an “active” satellite that received and retransmitted signals on a different frequency. In this audio file from Jan. 29, 1963, Jack James, manager of the Mariner program exploring the inner solar system at JPL, speaks with John Glenn, who was then providing astronaut input into the new Apollo program.

Early Satellite Communications: Project Relay

Plasmaspheric hiss waves as heard by NASA’s Polar mission as it passed around Earth.

Credits: NASA/University of Iowa

Plasmaspheric Hiss

If you're squeamish, you may not want to listen to the strange whistle of ultra-cold liquid helium-3 that changes volume relative to the North Pole and Earth's rotation. When ultra-cold liquid helium-4 was squashed through an array of tiny apertures, a phenomenon occurred in which the helium-4 repeatedly sped up, slowed down and vibrated. This produced a "quantum whistle" -- a whistling sound that went from high to low.

Ultra Cold Liquid Helium-3

By Daniel Wytanis

The musicians for NASA Explorers: Apollo took inspiration from science fiction, Apollo audio from the NASA archives and the excitement surrounding NASA’s upcoming human exploration of the Moon with the Artemis program.

Tycho's Daydream - From the soundtrack to “NASA Explorers: Apollo”

One year and three trips around the Sun later, NASA's Parker Solar Probe heard some weird, sci-fi sounds from plasma within the solar wind -- and those sounds may answer unanswered questions about how the wind forms.

Parker Solar Probe - Langmuir Waves

The Last Caculations Of A Dying Logic

Gimmik - The Last Calculations Of A Dying Logic

Hello, we’re NASA. You may have seen our astronauts, rocket launches, or Mars rovers — but have you heard our sounds? From interviews with astronauts and engineers to stories that take you on a tour of the galaxy, NASA’s audio offerings let you experience the thrill of space exploration without ever leaving Earth.

Golden Record: Akkadian Greeting

NASA

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