Data from the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) have captured the dynamic movement of the Sun’s atmosphere for over two decades. Now, thanks to researchers at the WW Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, Stanford University, we can hear the Sun’s movement with our own ears.
On August 31, 2012, a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The CME traveled at over 900 miles per second. It did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, with a glancing blow, causing aurora to appear on the night of September 3. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
SOHO is a project of international collaboration between NASA and ESA to study the internal structure of the Sun, its extensive outer atmosphere and the origin of the solar wind, the stream of highly ionized gas that blows continuously outward through the Solar System.
The spacecraft was launched on an Atlas II-AS rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida on December 2, 1995.
It moves around the Sun in step with the Earth, by slowly orbiting around the First Lagrangian Point (L1), where the combined gravity of the Earth and Sun keep the observatory in an orbit locked to the Earth-Sun line. The L1 point is approximately 1.5 million km away from Earth, in the direction of the Sun.
The scientific payload of SOHO comprises 12 complementary instruments, developed and furnished by 12 international consortia involving 29 institutes from 15 countries. Nine consortia are led by European scientists, the remaining three by US scientists.
NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations. Large radio dishes around the world which form NASA’s Deep Space Network are used for data downlink and commanding. Mission control is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
SOHO was designed to answer the following three fundamental scientific questions about the Sun:
– what is the structure and dynamics of the solar interior?
– why does the solar corona exist and how is it heated to the extremely high temperature of about one million degrees Celsius?
– where is the solar wind produced and how is it accelerated?
Clues on the solar interior come from studying seismic waves that are produced in the turbulent outer shell of the Sun and which appear as ripples on its surface.
“Waves are traveling and bouncing around inside the Sun, and if your eyes were sensitive enough they could actually see this,” said Dr. Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We don’t have straightforward ways to look inside the Sun. We don’t have a microscope to zoom inside the Sun.”
“So using a star or the Sun’s vibrations allows us to see inside of it.”
These vibrations allow solar physicists to study a range of complex motions inside the Sun, from solar flares to coronal mass ejections.
“We can see huge rivers of solar material flowing around,” Dr. Young said.
“We are finally starting to understand the layers of the Sun and the complexity.”
“That simple sound is giving us a probe inside of a star. I think that’s a pretty cool thing.”
Besides watching the Sun, SOHO has become the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history: as of September 2017, more than 3,300 comets had been found by the observatory.
