This has been bugging me for a few days. If I could miraculously get close enough to the sun to be within its atmosphere and hear something, how loud would it be? Does all that violent fusion stuff going on make noise?
Let’s get a bit sillier. Suppose I magically fill the solar system with atmosphere. Would we hear the sun or would it be a sub-sonic rumble only whales & pigeons could here? Or nothing?
Ridiculouser - how about the galaxy? All those super-novas going off. Would we hear anything?
Yes I know all those moons, planets & stars whipping though my magical atmosphere would really mess things up. Can we ignore that for the moment?
Well, if you think about it, the sun is constantly throwing off “atmosphere” in the form of solar wind. So really, to answer the question of what the sun would sound like if you could get close enough, the main answer would be… windy. And I imagine there’s some instability in the way that the fusion products expand outward, so I would guess also… bubbly, in a very rumbly kind of way.
Another magical thing to consider: sound is slow that the sound of the sun would take (I just did the math) 14.75 years. I believe that the closest supernova is so far away, its sound couldn’t possibly have gotten to us yet. Buuuuuuuut, as long as we’re being magical, I guess we could assume the stuff has been happening long enough that the sound waves have gotten here.
Given that, my guess is the supernovas etc. would STILL be so far away, their sound would have almost completely dissipated by the time it reached us. I suppose there could be an overall “din,” like a constant rumble, but it would more be from the stars doing their business than from the explosions etc. And even THEN, the rumble of our own sun would likely drown all the other stars out.