Chirping chorus rings out from an unexpected part of outer space

Many readers will be familiar with the dawn chorus, the birdsong that can be heard at the break of day, especially in spring. But this performance lends its name to another type of chorus — one of intense electromagnetic bursts — chiefly because, when these waves are converted into audio signals, they sound similar to birds chirping. These ‘chorus waves’ have been observed by radio receivers at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica since the late 1960s. They originate in space, high above a planet’s equator, and they loosely follow the path of its magnetic field. Earth, Jupiter and Saturn are all known to host chorus waves, but now, in a paper in Nature, Liu et al.¹ report the discovery of chorus waves in an unlikely location, some 160,000 kilometres away from Earth.

Nature 637, 798-799 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-04211-6

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