Ready Sunspots

There are millions of science-friendlies like us who are ready and willing to hear and read—to educate ourselves—to refine our personal cosmologies; we want to hear what solar scientists want to tell us. Their current studies and experiments, and their theories and predictions about our Sun’s influences on Earth would be too fascinating!

After months and months of anticipation, on March 25, 2008, one of three ready sunspots unleashed an M2-class solar flare. It hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, but the billion-ton cloud missed Earth. While the CME was still plowing through the Sun’s atmosphere, an amateur radio astronomer heard a heaving sound coming from the speaker of his short wave receiver in New Mexico USA. The pulsing sound was a solar radio burst generated by shock waves at the CMEs leading edge.

If that’s not exciting enough, you may actually hear the heaves or pulses, which, to this guy, is the music of the physical Universe: rhythms of heat expanding and contracting. Listen here or Science@NASA. Duration 60 seconds. Patience may be necessary for download of the audio via QuickTime player.

Whether or not ready sunspots are flinging flares our way, the Sun billows hydrogen, its predominant element, with an unimaginable outward force into all directions from around its sphere. In every instant, Earth’s diet for life depends on four to five billion tons of hydrogen, which are only one billionth of the hydrogen the Sun billows every instant.

Without Universe’s turbulent nature of explosive stars, there would be neither Sun nor Earth. If the size of Earth had been smaller or larger than itself, there’s no telling how creation would have appeared out of infinitesimal rearrangements of balanced energies: you and I, as we know humans, might not have been created at all.

Earth’s thin crust upon which we live is what an apple’s skin is to the apple. One way to imagine our semi-liquid planet’s constant churning beneath the crust is to warm some milk, then watch the quivering skim that lies atop the heated milk. The skim part is the same as raft-like continents floating above vast, turbulent, boiling dynamos generating gravity.

Imagine how much scientific and philosophical concentration has developed over millennia for embracing the revelation that our physical Universe is an unfolding of the music of itself to itself, stirring within humans’ deep curiosity a listening for and measuring of melodies the Universe sustains for its Nature.

As indigenous peoples do, we industrialized ones may remember to gawk, dance, sing, and tell stories of the exquisite Earth out of which we were birthed. The Sun has always been our amazing, conspicuous, eminent provider of harmony. We just forgot.

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead