We finally know what the Sun sounds like – and it’s surprisingly retro
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To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. Up Next. The Sun has just dropped its latest album. With all the boiling and bubbling gases, our closest star is a seriously noisy place.
![[This is what the Sun 'sounds like']](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235918176-c418.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
But you’ll never be able to ‘hear’ it because space is a vacuum, so sound waves don’t travel like they do on Earth. However, scientists have converted three years’ of solar flares into an audio-visual clip, allowing us to hear what ‘sound’ the Sun makes.
And it’s basically the celestial equivalent of ‘lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to’. The Sun sometimes coughs up solar flares, which occur when the star’s magnetic field twists and sends a burst of energy and charged particles. Solar spit-up, in other words, or the slightly nicer sounding ‘solar fireworks’, as the European Space Agency (ESA) put it.
These flares become more powerful as the Sun enters the peak of its 11-year cycle, called the solar maximum, when its magnetic poles flip. Their frequencies are mostly too low to be heard by humans – you know, if you ever got close enough to this fiery orb to hear them.
So the ESA used data from its British-built Solar Orbiter probe to give us Earthlings an idea of what they might sound like in a process called ‘sonification’. In the video, the blue circles that pop out are solar flares recorded by the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) instrument.
