Every morning, the sun rises without a sound. Poets have written about its golden silence and composers have tried to capture it.
But here’s the thing we need to realise.
That silence is a gift. Because if the sound of the Sun could actually travel from the star to Earth, it would be the loudest thing imaginable. It would, in fact, be loud enough to kill.
The Sun is, at its core, a colossal nuclear fusion reactor. Every second, it converts hundreds of millions of tonnes of hydrogen into helium, releasing staggering amounts of energy as heat, light, the lesser known form that is sound.
The sun roars, rumbles, and churns constantly. Its surface is a violent, seething ocean of plasma, bubbling with convection currents the size of continents. The noise generated is almost beyond comprehension.
HOW LOUD IS THE SUN?
Scientists estimate that the sound level at the surface of the Sun would be around 290 decibels.
For context, a jet engine at close range is about 140 decibels, already enough to rupture your eardrums. So mathematics would dictate that the sound made by the Sun is equivalent of 10,00,00,00,00,00,000 jet engines. Read that again.
A nuclear explosion registers around 210. If you are lucky, then at 290 decibels, you would just go deaf.
If not, then the shockwave from the loud sound would alone be enough to vaporise you.
So why don’t we hear any of it?
WHY DON’T WE HEAR THE SUN?
The answer is actually a simple one.
Space is a vacuum and sound is a vibration. Vibrations need a medium, like air, water, or solid matter, to travel through. Between the Sun and Earth lies roughly 150 million kilometres of almost perfect emptiness.
No medium, no sound.
The cosmos, mercifully, works like the world’s best set of noise-cancelling headphones.
This doesn’t mean scientists can’t hear the sun.
Using instruments that detect pressure waves on the sun’s surface, a field called helioseismology, researchers have been able to convert solar vibrations into audio.
The result, when slowed down to a human-audible range, is an eerie, resonant hum. It’s something between a musical organ and a distant thunderstorm.
So the next time you see a quiet sunrise, enjoy it. The universe has done you a rather large favour.
