As an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, Lucianne Walkowicz usually has to stretch to connect the peculiarities of space physics with things that people experience on Earth.

Then came the email about whales.

Sönke Johnsen, a biologist at Duke University, told Dr. Walkowicz that his team had stumbled upon a bizarre correlation: When the surface of the sun was pocked with dark sunspots, an indicator of solar storms, gray whales and other cetacean species seemed more likely to strand themselves on beaches. The team just needed an astronomer’s help wrangling the data.

“This was like a dream request,” Dr. Walkowicz said. “And I finally got to do something in marine biology, even though I didn’t study it.”

With that assistance, there is some evidence of this peculiar correlation, the researchers said in a paper published Monday in Current Biology.