Hi, Curious Universe listeners.

I have a question for you.

What does space sound like?

We'll see things like material from the surface of the Sun

that wants to extend outward into planetary space, but then it gets caught on a magnetic field line

and pulled back down to the surface of the sun.

Every now and then, these magnetic field lines

will kind of get twisted up,

and they'll no longer be able to keep their hold

to the surface of the sun, and they'll go flying out into

space. And when this happens, when we get something like a coronal mass ejection, the amount

of material that leaves the sun is oftentimes greater than the entire mass of the planet Earth. This is Robert Alexander.

He's a data sonification specialist that studies the heliosphere,

our sun's sphere of influence in space.

Our nearest star is a dynamic and turbulent one.

Most scientists turn data about its explosive activity into charts and graphs.

Traditionally, we would look at that, and it would be a line that would just kind of,

whoop, it'd go up, and come back down.

Robert translates it into sound.

Rather than just plotting it and looking at it, we can also listen to this eruption of particles. And when we listen to it,

it sounds like an explosion.

The first time I would play some of these sounds back for a research scientist. And something

...