Nature can be both tranquil and very noisy. It could also be musical.
But what about sounds from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, space? Despite what you read in
fiction books or see in science fiction movies, you can’t truly hear any sound in space.
Space is a vacuum, and the lack of air prevents sound from traveling through space. But what
if we discovered a way to listen to the stars, particularly the Sun?
Consider the possibility that sound can travel across space in the same way it does through
the Earth’s atmosphere. The Sun would cease to be a silent ball of
fire in the sky. Instead, it would be a never-ending white-noise machine that blared like a rock
concert throughout the day. The Sun is unbelievably loud, even if we cannot
hear it from Earth. It’s extremely loud and downright deafening. This is due to the
fact that the Sun, while appearing smooth and tranquil from Earth, is actually a whirlwind
of superheated plasma. The nuclear processes that provide energy
to a star result in the constant rising and falling of convection cells of superheated
gas across its surface. There are around a million of these on our Sun at any given time.
Suppose the convection cells are almost the size of Texas, and that they emerge from beneath
the surface, burning out and sinking, all within five minutes. That would be an extremely
violent operation and tremendously noisy. Each of these convection cells produces approximately
100 to 300 watts of sound energy per square meter, which is comparable to a police siren.
In addition, since the Sun’s surface area is around 10,000 times that of Earth, that
would be the equivalent of 10,000 “Earths” covered in police sirens, all blaring.
Since the Earth is 92 million miles from the Sun, the sound would be muffled by the time
it reached Earth. The Sun’s roar on Earth is estimated to
be roughly 100 decibels, which is slightly softer than speakers at a rock concert. Of
course, this is during the day. During the night, the roar would fade as we turn away
from the Sun. The roar would be sort of dull because the
sound waves coming to Earth would be made up of so many various frequencies.
But there are a few things that need to be overlooked in order to create a world where
the Sun can be heard. Of course, there’s the aspect of the vacuum
of space, but there’s also the fact that sound waves steepen as they travel across
long distances. This means that, like ocean waves, they will
eventually break and crash against each other. In this case, even if sound could travel through
space, the waves would never leave the Sun’s atmosphere or corona. They’d implode instead
as shock waves, disintegrating into heat. And, if we apply the experiment to the realm
of biology, an audible sun could have obliterated the concept of hearing altogether.
Any species that developed in a world where there was a constant roar may have completely
different hearing needs. Indeed, species in this fictitious world may
never have evolved the ability to perceive sound since they could never make out any
sounds at all. It’s safe to say we wouldn’t be able to
hear anything in such a hypothetical scenario. For more than two decades, data from ESA and
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has captured the Sun’s natural vibrations
and provided scientists with a visual representation of the dynamic movement of the Sun’s atmosphere.
Since there are no simple methods to zoom into the Sun, scientists look inside the Sun
through its vibrations. Using data from the observatory, they can
now hear the Sun’s movement, including all its waves, loops, and eruptions with their
own ears. They can use this sound to analyze complex
motions inside the Sun, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
Overall, it’s best the Sun’s uproar remains locked away by the emptiness of space because
it would render us deaf.