Jakarta –
As an object that has tremendous power, the Sun looks very quiet from Earth. We just think of it as a silent hot ball because sound cannot travel through space.
In fact, the Sun has a voice. If it could be heard, the noise at the center of our Solar System would be very, very disturbing.
The sun is basically a giant nuclear fusion reaction pumping out so much energy that it heats and illuminates our entire planet and the entire Solar System.
Along with the incredible amount of heat and light, it also emitted a significant amount of sound. However, we don’t hear it because sound cannot travel through space because it is a vacuum that does not contain particles to carry vibrations.
In a thread on the Reddit forum, Craig DeForest, a distinguished heliophysicist from the Southwest Research Institute’s Department of Space Studies answered questions about how loud the Sun would be if sound could travel through space the way it does through Earth’s atmosphere.
After doing some calculations, he explained that the Sun would theoretically emit about 100 decibels of sound. It’s almost as loud as standing next to a speaker at a rock concert or a crowded nightclub. The noise is incredible when we consider that the Sun is 150 million kilometers from us.
“The sun (sounds) is very loud. Luckily the sound doesn’t spread through space, huh?,” he said as quoted by IFL Science.
He added that we have an idea of sound quality thanks to various scientific instruments, such as the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), which is installed on the SOHO spacecraft and orbits the Sun about 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
Sound waves are so deep that they are usually at too low a frequency for the human ear to perceive. It is also not a single note, but a very complex, bell-like pattern of acoustic waves.
To make sound reach our ears, scientists must speed it up tens of thousands of times, condensing weeks of vibration into a few seconds. Therefore, the result that we hear is already a very refined and filtered version. The end result of this process is a low, throbbing hum, slightly sinister, but oddly soothing.
“True unfiltered sound is more like a cacophony, and to the ear it will sound more or less like resonance and noise,” explained Dr DeForest in a Reddit post.
Judging from a YouTube video featuring audio sonification of the Sun, it seems that Earth is still the planet with the best sound in the Solar System. Curious about what the sun sounds like? Listen in the video below.
Watch Video “Scientists Predict the Occurrence of a Star Swallowing Earth“
(rns/afr)
2023-05-27 00:15:08
#sun #sound #noisy
