Authors: Jaye Verniero (NASA GSFC), Robert Alexander (NASA GSFC/UMBC), Kristoff Paulson (SAO), Sam Badman (SAO)
Parker Solar Probe (PSP) is sampling unprecedented regions of the near-Sun environment to elucidate how, why, where, and when the solar wind originates, accelerates, and dissipates its energy into plasma heat. So far, PSP has revealed how the solar wind interacts with large-scale structures, such as Switchbacks (SBs), the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and Venus. Since the complex dynamics associated with these structures remains elusive, alternative data analysis techniques must be employed to shed light on these mysteries. In this presentation, we thus demonstrate the utility of audification, which maps spacecraft data to acoustic playback. Enhanced nonlinearity of human hearing enables increased perception of pitch and other dynamical waveform changes (i.e. spectral features) that could not be visually identified. Heliospheric plasma systems are inherently more complex than 2D plots, and thus we highlight how audification is a mechanism for accessing higher dimensional information and translating to sensory output for deepened contextual knowledge. Listen to the structure and dynamics of SBs, the HCS, CMEs, and Venus. Can you hear any new universalities or extra dimensionalities through these auditory modalities?