Name: Listen to the Sun like never before | BBC Global
Uploaded: 2025-06-26T03:03:03.000Z
Duration: 3 min 55 s
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The sun is the brightest object in our solar system.

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I'm at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where space lovers can not only see the sun.

The interesting part is, how loud would it be?

Now, of course, there is no air in space, so it wouldn't actually travel.

But if there was air, it would be deafening.

The sound it makes is roughly 140 decibels.

So it would be so strong that it would damage your hearing.

The sun naturally vibrates, and by looking at the changes in the light, we can see the vibration.

So we take pictures in visible light, and then we convert the oscillations that we see in those pictures into sound.

That is the sound that you hear in the solarium exhibit.

The sun itself is not a solid body, it's a plasma.

If you take, let's say ice, a solid, you heat it up, you get liquid, and if you heat it up even more, you get steam, well, if you heat it up a lot more, you then get a plasma.

Because you put enough energy into it that the individual atoms break apart into their constituents.

However, they move together, they have electrical charge, so it's basically like a liquid with electric and magnetic fields in it.

And that means that there's all kinds of complicated motions that are happening inside of it.

Not only does the sun make noise, so does solar wind.

There are three types of plasma waves that come from solar wind, and they all sound totally different.

If we look at, um, a liquid or a gas, we basically just have sound waves.

But in plasmas, because we have the electric and magnetic fields, we get very complicated motions.

So depending on on what's actually moving inside the plasma, you get all these different really rich types of wave structures.

The Parker solar probe launched in 2008, collected this sound using its radio telescopes.

So it's been taking orbits around the sun, it's been flying closer and closer.

It's gotten within several million kilometers.

Cameras pick up all those different kinds of waves, and that is all recorded, and then we have this digital signal that then is transmitted back to the ground.

Why is it so important for us to learn about the sun through sound?

The sun can have a direct interaction with us, large explosions on the sun can knock out communications, they can damage satellites and spacecraft that we depend on for GPS.

And even in the most extreme cases, they can knock out power grids.

So data of seeing what's happening inside the sun is helping us to understand how is it going to impact us.

And we depend on it every day, and it's in some ways it's one of the only constants, I think, in almost everybody's life.

Even if it's behind the clouds, it's there.