The Sun is a special experience in Earth’s life. I understand that. we feel it. But we can’t seem to hear it.
If so, does it sound like a blast? or something primitive heart rate?Or just a dull roar, a yell? 93 million miles Away? the sun is huge 100 times It is larger than Earth and has been particularly active recently, even causing eruptions. Distorts GPS and degrades communicationsand create aurora borealis. So what is silent treatment? These questions and more will keep coming up. popular science A seemingly simple question for readers: Does the sun make noise?
[ Related: Why our tumultuous sun was relatively quiet in the late 1600s ]
“The basic answer is no. It’s not for us,” University of Arizona professor and astronomer Chris Impey said by phone. popular science. “The sun doesn’t make any noise because it needs a medium to transmit noise and sound,” Impey explained. Essentially, “the space between us and the sun is almost a complete vacuum, so no sound can travel through it,” Impey added, “so no matter what the sun is doing, we It’s not transmitting sound to the world,” he added.
disappointing! Or… great! You might be lucky that you can’t hear a big plasma ball, but why can’t sound travel through the void to your eardrums when there’s virtually nothing blocking it?
“Sound is really interesting. It’s a pressure wave,” explains Shauna Edson, an astronomy educator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “Pressure waves have to travel through something, and our ears are adapted to interpret those pressure waves and turn them into sounds that our brains can recognize.” Understand. “To get people to imagine how sound works, Edson said he asks them to imagine beach balls lined up.
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“You push the ball at the end of the line, the ball rolls onto the next ball, that ball hits the next ball, and they all—boom, boom, boom” she explained. “The push traveled like a wave from ball to ball, all the way down the line. That’s what the sound does to the molecules of air, liquids, and solids that it passes through.” They are “so few and so far apart” that “even if you push the molecule, the wave can’t keep going because there’s nothing nearby to push it forward.” (hence the famous alien Catchphrase, “No one can hear you scream in space.”)
That is, because space is a vacuum, the sun cannot make sound as we conceptualize it on Earth. But still, given how big and energetic the Sun is, isn’t at least it’s doing something? Sound-like?
“The sun has vibrations and vibrations, so in a sense it has some elements of sound in it,” Impey said. However, the Sun is still so large compared to the Earth that “all of the Earth’s activity is [it] It’s an incredibly low frequency,” Impey said. In other words, solar activity was never the kind that the human ear evolved to perceive. Cool, but then why are there audio clips online that offer such otherworldly snippets? vibration or solar wind Via Stanford and Johns Hopkins? This is where something called sonification comes into play.
“This is a very clever idea in science, especially in astronomy, where you take distant phenomena like galaxies, or black holes sucking matter in, or the movement of Jupiter’s atmosphere, or the sun itself. “By converting the signals that are happening in that area into sound waves, we realize the signals in a non-visual way,” Impey said. While this technique helps scientists represent data, Impey says it also “misrepresents physics in some ways.” That’s not a real sound. ”
Impey elaborated that sonification is kind of like seeing a vivid image. infrared images Displayed on your phone screen from the James Webb Space Telescope. “The radiation detected was not visible to the naked eye, so it is not an actual color.”
Back to sonification. “This is a way to experience phenomena that are completely unsuited to human senses,” Impey explained.
There are several good reasons why experts rely on audio when interpreting such raw data. “Sound is one of the ways humans understand their environment,” Edson says.
[ Related: Why can’t we just launch all of Earth’s garbage into the sun? ]
“Hearing the sounds of raindrops and the wind blowing can tell you what the weather is like without looking outside. Hearing an ambulance siren tells you to get out of the way,” Edson says, “but sounds can also help with learning. It is also a means.” Just as a mechanic listens to the sound of an engine or a doctor listens to the heartbeat to detect abnormalities, scientists convert data into sound and condense it to understand what’s going on. “You can hear years of changes in seconds or minutes, and sometimes patterns emerge in your sound that you didn’t notice,” Edson explained.
like the earthOur sun has its own cycle of activity. And I’ve been very busy lately. “Now we are in what is called a state. maximum solar activity period” Edson said. “That means there are a lot of sunspots. There are a lot of flares. You can now see the aurora in places you don’t normally see it.”
When sunspot data is turned into sound, you can hear the sounds above and below it. 11 years “It’s a cycle,” Edson explained, “and it certainly sounds like a heartbeat.”
(Experts don’t say whether it turned out to be something like this) Ba-boom-ba-boomor Love dub, rub dub. )
This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Me Anything series, in which we answer the most outlandish and mind-blowing questions, from the mundane to the wild. Is there something you’ve always wanted to know? Please contact us.
