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Does the Sun make noise?
- The sun doesn’t make noise for us because sound needs a medium to carry it and the space between us and the sun is almost a perfect vacuum.
- Given how big and energetic the sun is, it has some elements like vibrations and oscillations within it that are at least sound-like.
- The sun's activity is low-frequency which means it's not perceivable by human ears.
- Clip recordings of oscillations or solar winds by Johns Hopkins and Stanford are not real sounds but sonification recordings of distant phenomena to turn their signals into sound waves so they can be more easily understood by scientists and others.
- Sound is used by humans to make sense of the environment and is used as a learning tool like in the case of data condensing by scientists.
- The sounds of sun spots when turned into sound can be heard as cycles that sound like a heartbeat.
- The sun is roughly 100 times wider than Earth, making it especially active lately, with eruptions distorting GPS, degrading communications, and creating auroras.
- Sonification is like viewing a vivid infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope on a phone screen, its for experiencing a phenomenon not for the human senses.
- Scientists convert data into sound to figure out what's happening and sometimes to recognize patterns that they wouldn't have noticed.
- Like Earth, the sun has its own activity cycle and is presently in the solar maximum, where auroras are seen in many places.
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