Sounds of the Sun

Space, Science

NASA heliophysicist Alex Young explains how sound connects us with the Sun and all other stars. This piece features low frequency sounds of the Sun.

You're actually hearing the vibration of the Sun. It almost has a warmth to it. It's just enough where I can almost feel the sound on my skin or on my clothes. I imagine feeling the Sun, you know, moving next to me. My name is Alex Young and I am the associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division here at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

When anything material moves, waves travel through it and the same thing happens inside the Sun. And these waves are traveling, bouncing around inside the Sun and if your eyes were sensitive enough you actually could see this jiggle, but what scientists have done is they've taken that jiggle and turned it into sound, into a sound that we can hear with our own ears.

The sun is vibrating at lots of different frequencies and one of the things that's pretty cool about that is we can use those vibrations in the Sun to look inside the Sun. We don't have straight forward ways to look inside the Sun. I mean, we don't have a microscope to zoom inside the Sun so using a star or the Sun's natural vibrations allows us to see inside of it and we can see huge rivers of solar material flowing around.

We are finally starting to understand the layers of the Sun and the complexity. It's really cool because all of this complex motions inside the Sun are in fact what generates magnetic fields inside the Sun and those magnetic fields float up to the surface and give us sunspots and those sunspots give us solar flares and coronal mass ejections, this whole thing we call space weather.

So all of these things are connected and that simple sound is giving us a probe inside of a star. I think that's a pretty cool thing. The dynamic imagery and sounds of the Sun are on display at the NASA Goddard Visitor Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Solarium is an immersive art installation that transports visitors into the heart of our solar system. This story was produced right here at Goddard by Katie Atkinson and Micheala Sosby. The sounds you heard in this piece were sonified by the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab. The data comes from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Lead Producers: Micheala Sosby (NASA/GSFC), Katie Atkinson (GSFC Interns)
Narrator: C. Alex Young (NASA/GSFC)
Technical Support: Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET Systems Inc.)
Music: "Flow" by Lee Rosevere

Country of origin: United States
Language: English
Published on: July 25, 2018

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