The sound of sunshine: NASA releases mesmerizing recording of the sun’s song

If you’ve ever wondered what the sun sounds like, today’s your lucky day – NASA has released a recording taken from our very own star.

The European Space Agency along with NASA’s solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been recording the sun’s movement for more than two decades. While some may be surprised to learn that the sun has a sound, the huge burning orb gives off a pulsing hum as its surface produces sound waves. The recordings reveal the sun contains “huge rivers of solar material flowing around.”

The audio recordings provide us with “a probe inside of a star,” Young adds.

Data from SOHO taken over 40 days was sonified by the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab. The process included removing the sound of spacecraft motion and other noise to find clean sound waves. This was then scaled to bring it to the audible human-hearing range.

“Waves are traveling and bouncing around inside the Sun, and if your eyes were sensitive enough they could actually see this,” NASA heliophysicist Alex Young explains. “We don’t have a microscope to zoom inside the Sun, so using a star or the Sun’s vibrations allows us to see inside of it.”

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