Sun Songs

Knowledge is infinite. We’ll never know it all, thank goodness.
Open mind, open eyes, open heart.

clipped from www.space.com Sun’s Atmosphere Sings By Jeanna Bryner Staff Writer posted: 18 April 2007 07:58 pm ET The study, presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Lancashire, England, reveals that the looping magnetic fields along the Sun’s outer regions, called the corona, carry magnetic sound waves in a similar manner to musical instruments such as guitars or pipe organs. Robertus von Fay-Siebenburgen of the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Center at the University of Sheffield and his colleagues combined information gleaned from sun-orbiting satellites with theoretical models of solar processes, such as coronal mass ejections. They found that explosive events at the Sun’s surface appear to trigger acoustic waves that bounce back and forth between both ends of the loops, a phenomenon known as a standing wave.