How loud is the Sun?

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xjwmx

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Some might find this interesting. Some time ago I tried to figure out how loud the Sun is.

There's nothing between here and there to carry sound. But if there was...

I found the loudness of a hydrogen bomb of a certain megatonnage at a certain distance. I found the megatonnage equivalent of the Sun somewhere. Use 93 million miles for the new distance. Use the inverse square law. Covert the result to decibels, easier said than done.

Anyway, the decibel scale for loudness isn't open ended - there's a point where an increase in "loudness" won't be perceived, so the scale ends there. I forget the value for that, but I remember that it's approximately as loud as having your ear laying against a jackhammer.

The calculations for the Sun was just slightly more power than that, so you can say the Sun as heard from the Earth would be about as loud as a jackhammer upside your head, if there was air to carry the sound. My gut feeling was that it would sound fairly faint.
 
The loudness of the sun is the sum of the square of the number of beers you drank and the diameter of the rocks under your tent last night. Jackhammer sounds about right.
 
Light travels faster than sound, maybe the noise from the sun hasn't had time to get here yet.

But when it gets here.......
 
gggGary said:
The loudness of the sun is the sum of the square of the number of beers you drank and the diameter of the rocks under your tent last night. Jackhammer sounds about right.
Click to expand...

:laugh::laugh::laugh:

The thing to take away from this is if you think things are bad, at least there's no air in space.
 
hamamatsu said:
Light travels faster than sound, maybe the noise from the sun hasn't had time to get here yet.

But when it gets here.......
Click to expand...


The time it would take the sound to get here is 93 million / 761 mph or about 14 years. So it's still on its way...
 
In Mark Twain's book, "Letters from Earth", he writes about how distant stars, that we see in the night sky, could have burned out thousands of years ago, but the light is still traveling, so we still see them.
 
That might be a good one to read. The last one I tried was Connecticut Yankee and I just bogged down with it.

The farther away they see with their telescopes, the longer ago the light was emitted. But at the same time they say the farther away they see, the nearer they see to the beginning of the universe. I haven't figured that out completely yet.
 
From what I've read it's because the "Big Bang" occured at point X or the beginning of the universe. And point Z is the farthest the explosion sent particles to or the end/outside of the universe. We are somewhere between those 2 points. So the farther we see, hopefully looking in the correct direction, the closer we get to the beginning.

Ever "seen" the explanation of gravity? Imagine a soft matress (the matter of space) and a large, heavy ball in the center, being the sun. The matress is now concave, in a bowl shape due to, basically, the weight of the sun. Now all the planets are circling around this ball being held in the mesh of matter. Basically like a whirlpool without a drain. Just spinning in a circle, held there by this concave mesh. I saw it on "Through the Wormhole". Pretty crazy to see it.
 
I don't know how loud the sun is but it would take 1 trillion dollars bills layed end to end to reach it. Were in debt for 15 trillion?
jefft
 
littlebill31 said:
In Mark Twain's book, "Letters from Earth", he writes about how distant stars, that we see in the night sky, could have burned out thousands of years ago, but the light is still traveling, so we still see them.
Click to expand...

Mr. Clemens was certainly a thinker. I have 'Collected Essays', one story is about learning to ride on one of those 'penny/farthing' bicycles and it's hilarious.

For all we know, the sun could have exploded eight minutes ago. It takes that long for sunlight to get here. Then gggGary's rocks and beer theory will really get put to the test. :D
 
and if you think photons having mass is crazy, check out neutrinos, again they have mass, and they can travel through the earth like its not even there!
acc to wiki, 65 billion neutrinos per second pass through each square cm of the earth perpendicular to the sun at posibly faster than the speed of light.
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