We finally know what the Sun sounds like – and it’s surprisingly retro

The Sun has just dropped its latest album.

With all the boiling and bubbling gases, our closest star is a seriously noisy place.

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.

‘The accompanying audio is a sonification based on the detected flares and the spacecraft’s distance to the Sun,’ European space officials said.

‘We can hear the flares in the metallic clinks in the sonification, where the sharpness of the sound corresponds to how energetic the solar flare is.’

Klaus Nielsen, an artist specializing in ‘lo-fi, ambient indietronica’ who goes by Maple Pools, created the sonification.

‘A sonification is a really smart way of making complex data accessible to public audiences – instead of presenting data as a stream of text or numbers, we hear sounds that represent the data in some way,’ Dr Adam Stanović, a programme director of sound and music at the University of the Arts London’s London College of Communication, told Metro.

‘In this case, we have a low-pitch representing the proximity of the orbiter to the sun, and high-frequency microsounds representing solar flares. The volume and clarity of these high-frequency sounds map onto the size of the flares themselves.’

The Solar Orbiter gets closest to the celestial body every six months or so, which is why the track goes from low humming to glitchy lo-fi.

‘Klaus Nielsen has done a really good job in sonifiying this particular dataset -the proximity of the sun creates a pulsating drone, while the solar flares create rhythmic patterns of different durations,’ added Dr Stanović.

‘When listening, we get a really clear sense of how frequently the solar flares occur, and how varied they can be in terms of their size and strength.’

The reason the sounds get progressively louder and, well, groovier is because we’re now in solar maximum. This is why we’ve seen the Northern Lights so often recently, especially in places we typically wouldn’t.

Nielsen has previously done a ‘scary’ audio installation on what the Earth’s magnetic field – our planet’s defence system – sounds like, while Nasa has sonified a black pole.

Space, it’s safe to say, is a very weird place.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.