Space is silent. That’s the rule we all learned in grade school because sound needs a medium—like air or water—to travel, and the vacuum of space is basically a giant empty room. But if you could somehow bridge that gap, you’d realize the Sun is actually screaming.
It’s loud.
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I’m talking deafeningly, mind-alteringly loud. If sound could travel through the vacuum between us and our star, you wouldn't be able to hear your own thoughts. You wouldn't be able to hear a jet engine standing right next to it. In fact, the noise would be so intense it would likely be physically painful or even lethal at close range. When people ask does the sun make noise, they are usually looking for a simple yes or no, but the physics behind it is way more chaotic and fascinating than a binary answer.
The Sun is essentially a massive, continuous hydrogen bomb. It’s a churning, boiling ball of plasma where convection cells the size of Texas rise and fall constantly. That movement creates pressure waves. In any other environment, those pressure waves are exactly what we call sound.
The Roar of a Billion Small Explosions
To understand the volume, we have to look at the scale of the Sun’s surface. It’s not a smooth lightbulb. It’s a violent, convective mess. Helioseismologists—scientists like Yvonne Elsworth or the teams at the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG)—spend their entire careers "listening" to the Sun by watching how its surface ripples.
Because the Sun is made of plasma, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument, albeit a very scary one. The internal pressure waves, or p-modes, bounce around inside the Sun. These waves are caused by the massive movement of hot gas. Imagine a pot of boiling water, but the pot is 865,000 miles wide and the water is millions of degrees.
If we could stick a microphone in the solar atmosphere (and assuming it didn't vaporize instantly), the sound level is estimated to be around 100 to 125 decibels. For context, that’s about the same as standing in the front row of a rock concert or being right next to a chainsaw. All the time. Every second of every day.
Why don't we hear it?
Physics. Specifically, the lack of molecules in the 93 million miles of "nothing" between us and the Sun. Sound is a mechanical wave; it needs to bump atoms into other atoms to move. Since the space between Earth and the Sun is a vacuum, those 125 decibels have nowhere to go. They are trapped within the Sun's own atmosphere and the surrounding corona.
Honestly, we should be thankful for that vacuum.
If the universe were filled with air, the Sun’s roar would reach Earth at about 100 decibels. Think about that. You would be walking to work, trying to have a conversation, and the background noise of the sky would be as loud as a freight train passing by. You'd have to scream just to be heard over the morning sunrise. Sleep would be impossible without massive soundproofing. Evolution probably would have skipped ears entirely.
How NASA "Hears" the Sun Anyway
Even though the sound can’t travel to us, we can see the sound. This sounds like a contradiction, but it's how technology bridges the gap. By using instruments like the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) on the SOHO spacecraft, researchers can track the "throb" of the Sun.
The Sun vibrates at very low frequencies, way too low for human ears to pick up. These are infrasonic waves. To make them audible, scientists take the data and speed it up by tens of thousands of times. This process is called sonification.
What does it sound like?
It’s not a melodic hum. It’s a low, pulsing thrum. It sounds like a heartbeat mixed with the white noise of a heavy storm. It’s the sound of trillions of tons of plasma moving at supersonic speeds.
"The Sun is vibrating at many different frequencies," says Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA Goddard. "It’s a natural vibration. We can't see into the Sun with light, but using these sound waves, we can see the entire interior."
The Complexity of Solar Acoustic Waves
The Sun doesn't just make one "noise." It’s an orchestra of chaos. There are three main types of waves that helioseismologists study to figure out what’s happening in the core:
- P-modes (Pressure waves): These are the ones most like the sound waves we know. They are driven by the pressure changes in the solar interior.
- G-modes (Gravity waves): These happen deeper in the interior. They are much harder to detect because they don't reach the surface as easily.
- F-modes (Fundamental ripples): Sort of like waves on the surface of the ocean.
Every time a solar flare erupts or a coronal mass ejection (CME) blasts off the surface, it sends a "sunquake" through the star. In 1998, the SOHO spacecraft recorded a sunquake following a flare that was equivalent to an 11.3 magnitude earthquake on Earth. That event produced ripples that traveled across the solar surface like a stone dropped in a pond.
The sound of that event would have been incomprehensible.
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The Acoustic Environment of Other Planets
If you're wondering does the sun make noise compared to other things in space, the answer is that the Sun is the undisputed heavyweight champion. But it’s not the only "loud" thing.
Jupiter is another noisy neighbor. Because Jupiter has a massive, powerful magnetosphere, it interacts with solar winds to create intense radio emissions. While these aren't "sound" in the traditional sense, they are easily converted into audio. When the Juno probe arrived at Jupiter, the "sounds" of entering the magnetosphere were haunting—whistles, chirps, and roars that sounded like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie.
But the Sun is different because its noise is mechanical. It’s the actual physical movement of matter.
What Most People Get Wrong About Space Silence
The common trope is "In space, no one can hear you scream." That’s true for your vocal cords, but space isn't actually a perfect vacuum. It’s a "near" vacuum. There are particles out there, just not enough of them to carry a wave over long distances.
However, in massive gas clouds (nebulae) or near the centers of galaxy clusters, the gas is sometimes dense enough to carry sound. In 2003, astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered sound waves in the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The "note" being played by a massive black hole there was a B-flat, but it was 57 octaves below middle C.
That is a sound you could never hear, but it is physically there, pushing through the hot gas of the cluster. The Sun is doing the same thing, just on a much more "local" scale.
Summary of the Solar "Soundtrack"
If you could stand on the Sun (and survive), you wouldn't hear a hum. You would hear a violent, turbulent roar. It would be the sound of constant explosions, the tearing of magnetic fields, and the rushing of plasma winds.
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The fact that we live in a silent world is a fluke of physics. We are protected from the Sun's heat by our atmosphere and its radiation by our magnetic field, but we are protected from its noise by the vacuum of space itself.
Actionable Insights for Space Enthusiasts
If you want to experience the "noise" of the Sun yourself, you don't need a spaceship. You just need the right data.
- Check out NASA's Sonification Projects: Search for "NASA Sun Sonification" on YouTube or the NASA website. They have high-quality audio files where they’ve translated solar data into the audible range. It’s great for meditation or just feeling small in a big universe.
- Follow Helioseismology Updates: Websites like SpaceWeather.com often report on major solar flares. When you see a "X-class flare" reported, realize that a massive acoustic event just happened that would have shaken an entire planet.
- Explore the SOHO Archives: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has decades of data. You can actually see the "Dopplergrams" which show the surface of the Sun moving toward and away from the camera—that’s the visual representation of the Sun's noise.
- Use Solar Apps: Apps like "Solar Walk" or "NASA" provide real-time imagery of the Sun in different wavelengths. While they don't play the "live roar," seeing the churning surface helps you visualize the sheer volume of the star.
The Sun isn't just a light in the sky. It's a vibrating, screaming, pulsing engine that powers everything we know. It just happens to be doing it very, very loudly in a room where no one can hear it.