You're actually hearing the vibration of the Sun.
It almost has a warmth to it.
It's just enough where I can almost
feel the sound on my skin or on my
clothes.
I imagine feeling the Sun, you know,
moving next to me.
My name is Alex Young and I am the
associate director for science
in the Heliophysics Science Division
here at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
When anything material moves,
waves travel through it
and the same thing happens
inside the Sun.
And these waves are traveling, bouncing
around inside the Sun and if your eyes
were sensitive enough you actually could
see this jiggle, but what scientists
have done is they've taken that jiggle
and turned it into sound,
into a sound that we can hear
with our own ears.
The sun is vibrating at lots of
different frequencies
and one of the things that's
pretty cool about that is
we can use those vibrations in the Sun
to look inside the Sun.
We don't have straightforward
ways to look inside the Sun.
I mean, we don't have a microscope
to zoom inside the Sun so using a star
or the Sun's natural vibrations allows
us to
see inside of it and we can see huge
rivers of
solar material flowing around.
We are finally starting to understand the
layers of the Sun and the complexity.
It's really cool because all of this
complex
motions inside the Sun are in fact what
generates magnetic fields inside the
Sun and those magnetic fields float up
to the surface
and give us sunspots and those
sunspots give us
solar flares and
coronal mass ejections, this whole
thing we call space weather.
So all of these things are connected
and that simple sound
is giving us a probe inside of a star.
I think that's a pretty cool thing.
The dynamic imagery and sounds of the Sun
are on display at the NASA Goddard Visitor Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Solarium is an immersive art
installation that transports visitors
into the heart of our solar system.
This story was produced right here at Goddard
by Katie Atkinson and Micheala Sosby.
The sounds you heard in this piece were sonified
by the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab.
The data comes from the Solar and
Heliospheric Observatory
a collaboration between the
European Space Agency and NASA.