Most people will miss the total solar eclipse that will darken tomorrow’s evening over the South Seas, east of Oceana to Argentina. A lucky family of humpback whales making their way back from a summer in the Antarctic Ocean might be lucky enough to see the illumined phantom. They might even be reminded of an ancestral song composed for such an occasion. An inveterate composer could even be inspired to create their own. And far removed from human eyes and ears, a dirgeful paean for a shaded sun might burst over the dancing foam.
But this article is not about the whales and their songs. It is about the song of the sun. It was recently discovered that the turbulent currents of heat and light which flow like plasma over the sun’s surface form giant magnetic loops that make a kind of music. These coronal loops, some of them over 180,000 miles long (responsible for solar flares), periodically oscillate, making a sound similar to the plucking of a string. Researchers at the University of Sheffield write:
These giant coronal loops have also been observed to undergo periodic (oscillatory) motion, which can be thought of as someone plucking a guitar string (transversal oscillations) or blowing the wind-pipe instrument (longitudinal oscillations). With the length and thickness of the string fixed, the pitch of the note is determined by the tension of the string and the tone is made up of the harmonics of the modes of oscillation.
Studying the music of the sun will allow solarists to better understand the star’s magnetic atmosphere, studying seismological shifts in much the same way that geologists study earthquakes. Sun scientists at the University give a fourteen-second recording of a coronal loop:
Click Here to Play the Coronal Loop
When the sun’s oscillating flares flicker into a ring of silence behind the interrupter moon, it is possible that the inveterate composer of our family of whales will feel the hush and raise a song. If so, its progeny will invariably carry the song onward. Maybe it will be called something like the “Sun Song.”
It seems like the solar eclipse always miss the US
It does seem that way, doesn’t it? — the next total eclipse to cross the US won’t be until August 21, 2017, but there will be an annular eclipse across the west coast on May 20, 2012. Until then, here’s a link that shows you how to build a radio telescope for listening to the sounds of the sun, streaming daily: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/epo/teachers/ittybitty/procedure.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvgTW22lSJo it went to the eastar island for the one time in 1.400 years