Can you hear the sun?

[kidlands]

I thought a vacuum did not allow it so how does the Soho satellite pick up the sound of the sun and process it to be audible to our ears?

[toml42]

It's not actually 'sound' the satellite is picking up, it's recording the pulsations of the sun visually and processing it into an audible sound by speeding it up nearly 42000 times

[beamish]

Where did you find that ? have you a link ?

[toml42]

sure The Singing Sun

[Rosanella]

Where did you find that ? have you a link ?

One of the SPA (Society for Popular Astronomy) lectures, last year, was about the Sound of the stars. And I remember watching a video on Youtube about the sound given out by Pulsars (sadly that particular video has now been removed It showed a musician - I cannot remember the famous band he belongs to -- who makes use of the sound of pulsars for one of his recent solo albums (sound of pulsars, left-click here-->The Sounds of Pulsars )

Fascinating!

[Capricorn]

The "sound" is an interpretation often refered to as a mapping.

The sun will be transmitting in radio wavelengths, we simply take those and say let radio frequency Ra = Sound Frequency Sa. Could as easily map the radio frequency by multiplying it by say a converstion factor (Just a number) and converting the radio frequency into visible wavelengths. Probably a better idea the converting into sounds.

In the sound arena one person may pick a high sound frequency or a low frequency for the same given radio frequency. Often depends on the work, research or observations they are doing.

Consider the Chandra images, very nice and often used as backgrounds on computers. They are however X-Ray images if I recall. What you see is mapped to Red, Green, Blue but the real images are in the X-ray wavelengths.

The question with this mapping is does Red = HOT as in high temperature (Lots of X-rays) or does BLUE = HOT as in high energy as in the eletromagnetic spectrum. So for an image the high energy X-ray could be Blue or could be Red depending on who converted and which colour pattern conveys the best information.

[beamish]

sure The Singing Sun

Cheers Tom !

[FraserClarke]

The "sound" is an interpretation often refered to as a mapping. The sun will be transmitting in radio wavelengths, we simply take those and say let radio frequency Ra = Sound Frequency Sa

What you say about images is absolutely correct, but in this case the 'sound of the sun' really is referring to a sound (see the links from Tom), rather than a visualisation of some other wavelength of radiation.

There are acoustic waves resonating through the Sun, and these cause the surface to pulsate very slightly. You can measure this pulsation (either from brightness changes or doppler shifts) and directly convert it into an acoustic frequency. It really is directly analogous to a bell ringing. The only difference here is that the 'bell' is so large that the frequencies are way below that of human hearing; so you have to speed it all up to be able to hear it with our ears...

The structure of the sounds tells you about the interior structure of the Sun, just in the same way that seismology tells you about the interior structure of the Earth.