Outreach

In this section you will find a variety of useful educational tools related to the work of the group, in particular on the Sun and stellar oscillations.

BiSON Live!

Click here to see real time telemetry and images from the BiSON sites.

Sounds of the Sun

The acoustic waves detected by BiSON are analogous to sound waves on the Earth. Imagine the oscillating surface of the Sun behaving like a sound source. For instance, a loudspeaker produces sound by generating compression waves in the air due to the movement of the cone. These pressure waves are detected by the ear and transmitted as electrical impulses to the brain. Similarly, the BiSON spectrometers are sensitive to spectral lines in sunlight. By observing the Doppler shift of these spectral lines we are able to reconstruct the movement of the solar surface and calculate the frequencies present using discrete Fourier methods. We can think of this as listening to the sound of the Sun. As with many sound sources, these are not pure tones and we need to extract the notes which are of interest to us.

Take a look at the link and hear the sounds of the Sun.

Modes Animation

BiSON is sensitive only to low degree solar oscillation modes. Here we show videos of these oscillations.

BiSON Java Applet

On this page we have set up a Java applet so that you can process some solar oscillations data collected from our network. It may take a few moments for the applet to load depending on the speed of your connection, so please be patient Once the applet has loaded you will see a red graph showing a set of data taken from three of our observatories.