Catch of solar gusts in a new citizen science project

Each day, the sun explodes radius of radio waves in space. These gusts are recovered by the instrument of radio and plasma waves of Solar Orbiter (RPW).

Five years of RPW data have now been divided into six -hour pieces, which leads to 15,000 radio graphics ready to be examined – far too much for a single scientist.

“Scientists have already tried to develop algorithms to automatically detect these radio, but they are often less effective in identifying lower or more complex gusts,” explains Katerina Psini, who heads the project as part of her doctorate at the Radboud and Paris University Observatory.

“Because some gusts are weak, distorted or blurred, we need human eyes!”

Your task is simple. Inspect the graphics and describe all the radio flats you see. Katerina and her team showed Instructions and advice On Zooniverse to help you.

For reliable results, each of the 15,000 graphics will be inspected by eight pairs of different eyes. Your efforts will create the first catalog of Radio Radio du Soleil seen by Solar Orbiter, which covers the last years of solar activity.

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This public database of dates, times and intensities of radio bursts will help us better understand how the sun behaves and how its energy bursts can affect planet Earth.

Katerina adds: “Apart from science, we will also use the catalog to train artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically identify radio bursts in the future.”

Katerina’s doctoral supervisors are the main scientists working on RPW and the data it collects. This is the first time that solar orbiters’ scientists have been inviting citizen scientists to explore the data from the mission.

2025 is an exciting year for the mission and for solar physics, with the culminating sun in its 11 year old cycle to “wake up” then to calm down. We have seen evidence of this growing activity in the past year with the northern lights visible across Europe.

The radio bursts that you are looking for this cycle. Known as “type III solar radio”, they are closely linked to solar eruptionswhich are huge explosions of radiation from the surface of the sun.

Solar rockets throw electrons into space. While they interact with other particles loaded around the sun, these electrons release radio waves in a type III radio. (Curious about other types of radio explodes? Click here))

With the new Catalog of Type III radio data, Katerina will be able to explore in detail how radio -rated activity varies during the solar cycle – something that was not possible before.

The solar orbit is perfect for this research; The RPW instrument can detect even very low radio waves, covers a wide range of radio frequencies and – for the first time – will measure radio waves near the sun’s poles.

Help Katerina get out by diving here And type III solar radio occurs as if no one has done before.

Solar Orbiter is a spatial mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.