Can you hear northern lights




















Given these findings, eminent physicists and meteorologists remained sceptical, dismissing accounts of auroral sound and very low aurorae as folkloric stories or auditory illusions. Similarly, the meteorologist George Clark Simpson argued that the appearance of low aurorae was likely an optical illusion caused by the interference of low clouds.

The answer to this enduring mystery which has subsequently garnered the most support was first tentatively suggested in by Clarence Chant , a well-known Canadian astronomer. What is clear is that the aurora does, on rare occasions, make sounds audible to the human ear. The eerie reports of crackling, whizzing and buzzing noises accompanying the lights describe an objective audible experience — not something illusory or imagined.

In recent years, the sound of the aurora has nonetheless been explored for its aesthetic value, inspiring musical compositions and laying the foundation for novel ways of interacting with its electromagnetic signals. His composition, Northern Lights , interweaves these reports with the only known Latvian folksong recounting the auroral sound phenomenon, sung by a tenor solo.

Or you can also listen to the radio signals of the northern lights at home. In , a BBC 3 radio programme remapped very low frequency radio recordings of the aurora onto the audible spectrum. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Read the original article. Sign In Subscribe Ad-Free. Can You Hear the Northern Lights? But a Finnish study in claimed to have finally confirmed that the northern lights produce sound audible to the human ear. A recording made by one of the researchers involved in the study even claimed to have captured the sound made by the captivating lights 70 meters feet above ground level. Still, the mechanism behind the sound remains somewhat mysterious, as are the conditions that must be met for the sound to be heard.

My recent research takes a look over historical reports of auroral sound to understand the methods of investigating this elusive phenomenon and the process of establishing whether reported sounds were objective, illusory, or imaginary. Auroral noise was the subject of particularly lively debate in the first decades of the 20th century when accounts from settlements across northern latitudes reported that sound sometimes accompanied the mesmerizing light displays in their skies.

Witnesses told of a quiet, almost imperceptible crackling, whooshing, or whizzing noise during particularly violent northern lights displays. These tales were corroborated by similar testimony from northern Canada and Norway.

Yet the scientific community was less than convinced, especially considering very few western explorers claimed to have heard the elusive noises themselves. The credibility of auroral noise reports from this time is intimately tied to altitude measurements of the northern lights. The problem here was that results recorded during the Second International Polar Year of found aurorae most commonly took place km 62 miles above Earth and very rarely below 80 km 50 miles.

Given these findings, eminent physicists and meteorologists remained skeptical, dismissing accounts of auroral sound and very low aurorae as folkloric stories or auditory illusions. Similarly, meteorologist George Clark Simpson argued that the appearance of low aurorae was likely an optical illusion caused by the interference of low clouds.

The answer to this enduring mystery that has garnered the most support was first tentatively suggested in by Clarence Chant , a well-known Canadian astronomer.



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