Does the sun make noise?

Asker: Patricia, 42 years old

Answer

Sound is a wave, a pressure wave: rhythmic pressure changes of matter or a medium. On Earth, this compressible matter is usually simply air. But we can also perceive sound in water and even in solids. Just think of whales that can ‘talk’ to each other in water. Without matter (gas, liquid, solid) you have no sound and we are done talking. The sun consists of matter: hot plasma. This is a gas. The plasma boils, so to speak, and this chaotic process creates sound waves. The sun does make noise. But we can’t hear them for 2 reasons:
1) The sound waves are trapped in the sun. They cannot escape and continue to walk in the thin space and travel all the way to the earth. This is because there is virtually no matter in space, it is an ‘almost’ vacuum. That’s why it’s so quiet in space.
2) If the pressure waves do get to here, we can’t hear them because the pitch/frequency is too low for human hearing.

Answered by

dr. Petra Vanlommel

Some keywords are: sun, space weather, sun-earth relationship

Does the sun make noise?

Royal Observatory of Belgium
Boulevard Boechout 10 1020 Brussels
http://www.astro.oma.be/

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