Catch solar bursts in new citizen science project

Every day, the Sun blasts bursts of radio waves into space. These bursts are picked up by Solar Orbiter’s Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument.

Five years of RPW data have now been divided into six-hour chunks, resulting in 15 000 radio wave graphs ready for scrutiny – far too many for one scientist alone.

“Scientists have already tried to develop algorithms to detect these radio bursts automatically, but they are often less effective at identifying fainter or more complex bursts,” says Katerina Pesini, who is leading the project as part of her PhD at Radboud University and Paris Observatory.

“Because some bursts are faint, distorted or fuzzy, we need human eyes!”

Your task is straightforward. Inspect the graphs and outline all the radio bursts that you see. Katerina and her team have laid out detailed instructions and guidance on Zooniverse to help you out.

For reliable results, each of the 15 000 graphs will be inspected by eight different pairs of eyes. Your efforts will create the first catalogue of radio bursts from the Sun seen by Solar Orbiter, which covers the most recent years of solar activity.

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This public databank of dates, times and intensities of radio bursts will help us understand more about how the Sun behaves and how its bursts of energy can affect planet Earth.

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

Katerina’s PhD supervisors are the lead scientists working on RPW and the data it collects. This is the first time that Solar Orbiter scientists are inviting citizen scientists to explore mission data.

2025 is an exciting year for the mission and for solar physics, with the Sun peaking in its 11-year cycle of ‘waking up’ and then calming down. We have seen evidence of this increasing activity over the past year with the northern lights visible across Europe.

The radio bursts you are searching for follow this cycle. Known as ‘Type III solar radio bursts’, they are closely linked to solar flares, which are tremendous explosions of radiation from the Sun’s surface.

Solar flares fling electrons out into space. As they interact with other charged particles around the Sun, these electrons release radio waves in a Type III radio burst. (Curious about other types of radio bursts? Click here)

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

Solar Orbiter is perfect for this research; the RPW instrument can detect even very weak radio waves, covers a wide range of radio frequencies, and will – for the first time ever – measure radio waves from close to the Sun’s poles.

Help Katerina out by diving in here and track Type III solar radio bursts like nobody has done before.

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