It must do, mustn't it?
If we could hear it, would it sound like a non-stop volcanic eruption? Or a primordial heartbeat? Or just a dull roar, bellowing 93 million miles away? The sun is huge - roughly 100 times wider than Earth - and it’s especially active lately as it has reached what is called the solar maximum, which is why we are enjoying an Aurora Bonanza.
So what’s with the silent treatment? Does the sun make a noise?
“The basic answer is no, not for us,” says Chris Impey, an astronomer and professor at the University of Arizona. “The sun doesn’t make noise because noise, or sound, needs a medium to carry it.” Essentially, the space “between us and the sun is almost a perfect vacuum, so sound can’t travel through that.” Impey added, “So whatever the sun is doing, it’s not transmitting sound to us.”
“Sound is so funny. It’s a pressure wave,” explains Shauna Edson, an astronomy educator at the National Air and Space Museum in D.C. “It has to move through something, and our ears are adapted to interpret those pressure waves and turn them into a sound that our brain can understand.”
“The sun has oscillations and vibrations,” says Impey, “so in a sense, it does have some of the elements of sound within it.” But even so, because the sun is so large relative to Earth, “all the activity in [it] is incredibly low-frequency.” In other words, sun activity is definitely not the sort of thing human ears evolved to perceive.