It’s a haunting, almost metallic howl, an otherworldly hum that you’d expect would come from the bottom of the ocean, where it’s dark and cold (kind of like space). But it’s actually the sound of the Sun.
Yes, that great big ball of fire in the sky makes noise, and new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) has a terrific recording of what the Sun sounds like.
“Waves are traveling and bouncing around inside the Sun, and if your eyes were sensitive enough they could actually see this,” explains Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Believe it or not, these recordings are giving scientists the opportunity to look inside of the sun, which contains vast rivers of violently hot solar material and previously unexplored layers.
“All of this complex motion inside the sun are in fact what generates magnetic fields inside the sun,” Young said. “Those magnetic fields float up to the surface and give us sun spots and those sun spots give us solar flares and coronal mass ejections. All of these things are connected.”
You can listen to the sounds of the sun in the recording above.
