Sounds of the Sun

 

This is an extract from my book "Existence Downloaded -- Activated, Operated, Terminated"

SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) is a powerful new spacecraft. It monitors the sun twenty-four hours a day, offering new insights into our nearest star. Tracing the in-and-out heaving motions of the sun’s outer-most visible surface, named the photosphere from the Greek word photos, meaning “light”, is one method of exploring its unseen depths – says Kenneth R. Lang (Magnificent Cosmos, 1998). This “heaving”, he explains, can reach as many as ten kilometres high, travelling at a few hundred metres per second, and arises from sounds that course through the solar interior. The sounds are trapped inside the sun; they cannot propagate through the near vacuum of space – and, even if they could reach Earth, they are too low in frequency to be audible to humans.

Nevertheless, when these sounds strike the sun’s surface and rebound back down, they disturb the gases there, causing them to rise and fall, slowly and rhythmically, with a period of about five minutes. The throbbing motions these sounds create are imperceptible to the naked eye, but SOHO instruments routinely pick them out. (Kenneth R. Lang, in Magnificent Cosmos)

 

 Stunning but true, the sun chants AUM all the time