This suggested it would be impossible for discernible sound from the lights to be transmitted to the Earth's surface. The problem here was that results recorded during the Second International Polar Year of 1932-33 found aurorae most commonly took place 100km (62 miles) above Earth, and very rarely below 80km (50 miles). It was considered that only those displays that descended low into the Earth’s atmosphere would be able to transmit sound which could be heard by the human ear. The credibility of auroral noise reports from this time was intimately tied to altitude measurements of the Northern Lights. Yet the scientific community was less than convinced, especially considering very few western explorers claimed to have heard the elusive noises themselves. These tales were corroborated by similar testimony from northern Canada and Norway.

In the early 1930s, for instance, personal testimonies started flooding into The Shetland News, the weekly newspaper of the subarctic Shetland Islands, likening the sound of the Northern Lights to 'rustling silk' or 'two planks meeting flat ways'. Witnesses told of a quiet, almost imperceptible crackling, whooshing or whizzing noise during particularly violent Northern Lights displays. My recent research takes a look over historic reports of auroral sound to understand the methods of investigating this elusive phenomenon and the process of establishing whether reported sounds were objective, illusory or imaginary.Īuroral noise was the subject of particularly lively debate in the first decades of the 20th Century, when accounts from settlements across northern latitudes reported that sound sometimes accompanied the mesmerising light displays in their skies. Still, the mechanism behind the sound remains somewhat mysterious, as are the conditions that must be met for the sound to be heard. One of the researchers involved in the study captured a sound, possibly made by the captivating lights, that was estimated to have originated 70m (230ft) above ground level.

Reports of the aurora making a noise, however, are rare – and were historically dismissed by scientists.īut a Finnish study from 2016 claimed to have finally confirmed that the Northern Lights really do produce sound audible to the human ear. It's a question that has puzzled observers for centuries: do the fantastic green and crimson light displays of the aurora borealis produce any discernible sound?Ĭonjured by the interaction of solar particles with gas molecules in Earth's atmosphere, the aurora generally occurs near Earth's poles, where the magnetic field is strongest.

Mechanism behind actor observer bias