What Would the Sun Sound Like if We Could Hear It From Earth Listening to the Power of a Star (4K)

The Sun is just one of trillions of stars that populate the universe. But out of all of the stars that have ever existed, it is possibly the most extraordinary. Why? Because it nurtures the Earth, the only place, as far as we currently know, which allows life to feel its warmth and see its light. But what if we could hear the Sun as well? What would it sound like if every morning the sunrise brought with it not just light and warmth, but also noise? Much like the video I made about the real sound of a black hole, which I'll link to at the end of this video, we cannot directly hear the Sun from Earth. The laws of physics prevent sound from travelling through the vacuum of space. It needs a medium to move through, such as a gas or water, for example. But the Sun does make a tremendous amount of noise. It may hang silently in our sky, but travel the 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers to the Sun and it would sound deafening. So, as part of an intriguing thought experiment that I found online, let's find out what the awesome power of our star would sound like if we could hear it from the surface of Earth. First, we must assume for a moment that we are in an alternative universe, where sound can propagate through the vacuum of space. Imagine that space was full of dense gas, for example. Then, we must assume that sound waves produced by the Sun would make it all the way to Earth without breaking up like waves on a beach. Only then can we imagine what it would be like as our noisy Sun slowly appears above the horizon, bringing forth a new day, but also the colossal roar of chaos. A noise so loud, according to scientists, that you wouldn't even be able to hear your family say good morning. To understand how loud the Sun really is, we first need to find out a little bit about how it works. The Sun is a giant sphere of unimaginably hot plasma that is powered by nuclear fusion reactions deep within its core. It has no solid mass, meaning it doesn't have a distinct, solid surface like the Earth. Instead, it is composed of layers made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and so the surface of the Sun is considered as the first visible layer. It is the layer called the photosphere and is where a hell of a lot of sound would be produced. This incredible, real footage is of a small region of the photosphere, revealing dynamic grain-like structures moving and evolving in shape, providing a detailed look at how active the surface is. These moving structures are called convection cells and occur when superheated plasma from deep within the Sun rises, cools, and then sinks back down in a process called convection. The same process can be seen when water is bubbling in a boiling pot, for example. On the Sun, there is estimated to be millions of these at any given time, and each cell is about the size of Texas. So you can imagine just how violent and loud one of these structures would be. According to some calculations that I found online, the surface of the Sun, which remember is an extremely turbulent place and so these numbers are only estimated, emits around 200 watts of sound power per square meter of surface area, which means that the Sun's surface sound would equate to about 329 decibels, making the Sun unimaginably loud. As a frame of reference, a standard vacuum cleaner produces around 75 decibels, a chainsaw about 110 decibels, but once you go above 125 decibels, you would start to feel pain in your ears. Above 160 and your eardrums would likely burst, while sounds above 185 decibels can impact your organs so severely that it can cause death. But the Sun is extremely far away, at an average distance of about 93 million miles or about 150 million kilometers. It is so far away, in fact, that it takes light more than 8 minutes to reach us. So if sound could travel through the vacuum of space within this alternative universe that we have created, then the Sun's sound waves would be somewhat weakened by the time it arrived at Earth. This would mean that every time the Sun rose above the horizon, we would hear its chaotic noise at around 100 decibels, which is about the same as standing near a speaker at a rock concert all day every day. Of course, at night the sound would fade dramatically, providing some relief and possibly the chance of having a conversation. According to scientists who study the Sun, the sound itself would be like a dull roar due to the number of different frequencies that make up the sound waves. One article I found said it would be like standing next to Niagara Falls all of the time, just much louder. So the Sun, which is deafening up close, would still be extremely loud if we could hear it from Earth, even though it is so far away. It would be like a perpetual white noise machine, blaring with the intensity of a rock concert at all hours of the day, which is incredible when you think of the distances involved. Luckily for us, however, sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space. But even if it could, life would have probably skipped the hearing part of evolution. Either way, just as we were told as youngsters never to look directly at the Sun, we now know never to listen directly to it either. Did you enjoy this thought experiment? Let me know in the comments section below. If you want to explore more of the universe, check out some of my other videos, tap the like button and subscribe, there's plenty more to come. Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you all next time. In radial directions, as you will see in the animation that comes with the recording. The signals were then re-synthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put it is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. The result is this eerie intergalactic howl. This is the sound of a distant supermassive black hole ringing throughout the universe.