Despite its immense power, the Sun can seem like a very quiet place when viewed from Earth. However, this is due to our perception of the Sun as a silent ball of fire, simply because sound does not propagate through space. If sound were to propagate through space, this fireball standing at the center of our Solar System would make a tremendous noise.
The sun is basically a giant nuclear fusion reaction. It has so much energy that it warms and illuminates the entire Solar System.
But this incredible amount of heat and light is accompanied by a significant amount of sound. However, we do not hear this sound because it cannot travel through space because it is a vacuum that does not contain particles to carry vibrations.
In a 2015 Reddit thread, Craig DeForest, a leading solar physicist in the Southwest Research Institute’s Department of Space Studies, answered a question about how noisy the Sun would be if sound could hypothetically travel through space as well as through Earth’s atmosphere.
After some calculations, he explained that the Sun would theoretically cause a sound of about 100 decibels. This amount of sound is almost comparable to standing next to a loudspeaker at a concert. Considering that the Sun is 150 million kilometers away from us, it can easily be said that it is quite remarkable that so many sounds will reach our planet.
DeForest added that we have some idea of the quality of the sound thanks to numerous scientific instruments, such as the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) aboard the SOHO spacecraft orbiting the Sun 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
Sound waves are so deep that they are at frequencies that are normally too low for the human ear to detect. It also creates not a singular tone but an intensely complex pattern of acoustic waves, similar to a bell.
To make sounds audible to our ears, scientists need to speed up sounds tens of thousands of times by compressing weeks of vibrations into a few seconds. The end result of this process is a low, pulsating hum.
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