NASA’s ‘Chorus’ Recording, ‘Natural Radio’ and the Magnetosphere

When I heard the new NASA recordings of the “Chorus” of charged particles in the earth’s magnetosphere that I commented on in Tuesday’s program, I was immediately reminded of similar recordings made here on earth a few years back and transformed into the most wonderful piece of music.

It’s called “Sun Song,” and was put together by radio producer Barrett Golding for the program I worked for at the time, PRI’s Living on Earth.

Barrett was and is one of the great, old-school, truly independent voices of public radio, and he called this wild and weird sound “natural radio.”

You can hear the piece at hearingvoices.com/news/best-of-bg/. Scroll about halfway down the page to find the audio.

Radiation values in the van Allen Belts... or Beetle? (US National Space Data Center)

No lie!

And then there’s this plain old but nonetheless elegant 2-D rendering of your garden variety AP8 MIN omnidirectional proton flux >=1MeV, which diagrams radiation values in a part of the magnetosphere known as the van Allen Belts.

I had hoped to talk with Mr. van Allen himself to be sure it wasn’t actually a drawing of some kind of beetle, but he’s been unavailable since 2006.

Follow @bluepearmain