Here's What Happens When Scientists Turn Solar Wind Data Into Sound

So that's what the sun sounds like.

There may be no sound in deep space, but researchers are converting data from the sun into sound so that NASA scientists can listen to it as well as look at it.

The result of this sonification process can be pretty eerie--just have a listen to the video above, which features the sounds of solar wind data from NASA's WIND spacecraft.

"Here we're listening to observations of the solar magnetic field, specifically, we're listening to changes in intensity as this field is dragged outward by the solar wind," Robert Alexander, a sonification specialist and Ph.D. candidate in design science at the University of Michigan, told The Huffington Post in an email. "One could say that we're listening to sounds from space, but it's more accurate to say that we're listening to sounds generated from satellite data sets."

Turning data into sound is not new. In 1982, sonification was used to detect micrometeroids hitting the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it journeyed across Saturn's rings.

A paper describing the sonification of the WIND data was published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.