BTW this sound IRL is MUCH longer than 3 minutes, specifically the sound you’re hearing in the vid is sped up by a factor of 42,000 to make it audible to human ears
if it sounds familiar, you probably remember playing with a plasma sphere as a kid, no? it’s exactly that, it’s the sound of plasma flowing around in the sun’s atmosphere, i.e. solar weather
a microwave sounds similar on account of an oscillating magnetic field causing metal components inside the microwave to vibrate, is literally what’s happening inside the sun as the shifting plasma winds inside the sun generate a very powerful oscillating magnetic field
thus if you can’t hear it, it’s because bipedal primates haven’t evolved to hear frequencies lower than 20 hz, big whoop XD
the sound is that of a big “microwave” oven making helium for birthday balloons in it’s core
like no other factory in our solar system, our sun uses gravity to mix hydrogen atoms by waterfalls, churning and mixing trillions of tonnes of plasma an hour via nuclear reaction, also producing energy mostly in the form of gamma rays and X-rays at the core, continuously absorbed and re-emitted by atoms throughout the sun’s layers for centuries before making it to the surface and being spat out into space in the form of mostly visible light
but a very tiny fraction of the emitted radiation is the UV light which activates photosynthesis and fuels just about all life on earth
the energy of being a living organism, of doing things, of thinking, of all of your existence, and that of all that walks, all that runs, of all that swims, of all that crawls, of all that flies, of all that thinks, of all that plays, of all that fucks
Jon
I mean, you also can’t here it because there’s 93 million miles of vacuum between here and there, and vacuum is quite noted for its inability to propagate sound. There’s a movie tagline about it and everything!
Jon
*can’t [i]hear[/i] it. I shouldn’t be typing this late.
I mean we can literally hear it on earth despite that distance thanks to the work of scientists who turned raw doppler imager data from artificial satellites orbiting the sun into the video sound above 😛
is basically the audio recording equivalent of long-exposure photography
heck even without these satelites, the sun’s atmospheric activity can very much be heard on earth in the form of radio interference caused by coronal mass ejections and solar flares
Vigil247
This comment thread is beautiful. We’re just a bunch of great apes using a massive global infrastructure of communications technology to look at art and talk about stars. Humans are so awesome lol
Leslie: I just want to make it clear I am not a substitute for your mother.
Charlie: Of course not. My mother is 10 billion cosmic bees. They sang in harmony at the time of the great conjunction, and so it came to pass that I had always been.
Aren’t they twins? …this is a stupid question and I’m too tired to Google it, but are there twins where one was born vaginally and the other through C-section?
As an unrelated side note, there was apparently a point in history where C-section births didn’t used to meet the colloquial (and possibly the then-official? I dunno) definition of “birth.” It’s the reason why Duncan was able to kill the eponymous Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play, given the “no man of woman born” could kill Macbeth. The implication was supposed to be that Duncan came into the world by C-section, and thus wasn’t technically “born” by the cultural understanding of the time.
As a C-section child, this greatly amuses me, and so I sometimes like to privately joke to myself that I was never actually born and that my “birthday” was a sham. A conspiracy, I tell you!
Decidedly Orthogonal
Clearly we just need to carve out a day to celebrate you properly.
Nymph
I like the implication that the first part describes “being born”.
It’s not super common but yeah, if something goes wrong with birthing the second twin it might need to get swapped to an emergency C-section after the first has already been born.
Michael Steamweed
Yes indeed. Problems can arise when birthing twins. Cord around neck; breech position. Bad stuff: time to get ’em out the hard way.
Well, actually…
There is free gas floating around between the stars, and there are interactions between them, so there is “sound” in space. Between the stars in our galaxy the speed of sound is around 100 km/s.
There is even a star cluster that is reverberating to a single sound wave, B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C.
Yes. Not sounds we can hear but it’s all vibrations in the medium anyway. But if it were many orders of magnitude stronger, we could hear it. (and that would be bad)
In the strictest sense, they aren’t. Sound is pressure waves specifically, like you wouldn’t call a ripple a sound. The equations for sound wave propagation are also of a completely different character to those for gravitational wave propagation, so a gravitational wave doesn’t necessarily have any of the properties of sound, such as the ability to bounce off solid objects, being ‘louder’ the closer you are to the source, doppler shifting, etc.
Dear Dina, why did you take back the hat you gave Charlie?! At the very least, you should’ve gotten her a replacement first! (But this time, go get the hat yourself, instead of traveling with Charlie; not sure the universe could survive that)
The hat she ended up with after that quest was the same hat she started with… which Dina almost immediately snatched away… so yeah, Charlie still needs a hat.
167 thoughts on “Not anyone’s mother”
NGPZ
this is the sound of the sun she’s talking about BTW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I-zdmg_Dno
is the sound of nuclear fusion turning 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into 596 million tonnes of helium every second
RassilonTDavros
…you know, I could swear I’ve heard this exact sound in a 1960s Dr. Who episode.
Fëanen
I read your comment as tongue in cheek, but listening to it…yeah, total Dalek city vibes.
Joe Moose
That has to be one of the most zoned out sounds I’ve heard. I was immediately put into a zoinked out state. Weird/
NGPZ
BTW this sound IRL is MUCH longer than 3 minutes, specifically the sound you’re hearing in the vid is sped up by a factor of 42,000 to make it audible to human ears
if it sounds familiar, you probably remember playing with a plasma sphere as a kid, no? it’s exactly that, it’s the sound of plasma flowing around in the sun’s atmosphere, i.e. solar weather
a microwave sounds similar on account of an oscillating magnetic field causing metal components inside the microwave to vibrate, is literally what’s happening inside the sun as the shifting plasma winds inside the sun generate a very powerful oscillating magnetic field
NGPZ
thus if you can’t hear it, it’s because bipedal primates haven’t evolved to hear frequencies lower than 20 hz, big whoop XD
the sound is that of a big “microwave” oven making helium for birthday balloons in it’s core
like no other factory in our solar system, our sun uses gravity to mix hydrogen atoms by waterfalls, churning and mixing trillions of tonnes of plasma an hour via nuclear reaction, also producing energy mostly in the form of gamma rays and X-rays at the core, continuously absorbed and re-emitted by atoms throughout the sun’s layers for centuries before making it to the surface and being spat out into space in the form of mostly visible light
but a very tiny fraction of the emitted radiation is the UV light which activates photosynthesis and fuels just about all life on earth
the energy of being a living organism, of doing things, of thinking, of all of your existence, and that of all that walks, all that runs, of all that swims, of all that crawls, of all that flies, of all that thinks, of all that plays, of all that fucks
Jon
I mean, you also can’t here it because there’s 93 million miles of vacuum between here and there, and vacuum is quite noted for its inability to propagate sound. There’s a movie tagline about it and everything!
Jon
*can’t [i]hear[/i] it. I shouldn’t be typing this late.
NGPZ
I mean we can literally hear it on earth despite that distance thanks to the work of scientists who turned raw doppler imager data from artificial satellites orbiting the sun into the video sound above 😛
is basically the audio recording equivalent of long-exposure photography
NGPZ
heck even without these satelites, the sun’s atmospheric activity can very much be heard on earth in the form of radio interference caused by coronal mass ejections and solar flares
Vigil247
This comment thread is beautiful. We’re just a bunch of great apes using a massive global infrastructure of communications technology to look at art and talk about stars. Humans are so awesome lol
NGPZ
of course
hardly a coincidence the internet itself was literally invented by physicists :)
eh, whatever
…I’m late, but… photosynthesis uses red and blue, not UV.
NGPZ
ah yes, not always easy to keep track of which wavelength’s do what in earth’s carbon based life
except of course gamma and X-rays, their effects on living cells are pretty hard not to overstate XD
Xaeon
So that is what I keep hearing…then what’s making the laughing sound?
Opus the Poet
Solar turbulence when speeded up sometimes sounds like a baby laughing, making the opening credits of Teletubbies a physics lesson for toddlers.
Ana Chronistic
so… this?
Regret
I was thinking more like this:
https://youtu.be/wWoQ7PFSYlk?si=HhWYJvpa5PNP5N98
Doctor_Who
Leslie: I just want to make it clear I am not a substitute for your mother.
Charlie: Of course not. My mother is 10 billion cosmic bees. They sang in harmony at the time of the great conjunction, and so it came to pass that I had always been.
Leslie: …And Booster?
Charlie: Oh, they were just a C-section.
Jo_cubstar
Aren’t they twins? …this is a stupid question and I’m too tired to Google it, but are there twins where one was born vaginally and the other through C-section?
Doctor_Who
I like the implication that that’s the only part of this explanation that doesn’t make sense.
Jeremiah
Well yes everything else was perfectly logical and natural, the c section is what seems weird
Songbird
As an unrelated side note, there was apparently a point in history where C-section births didn’t used to meet the colloquial (and possibly the then-official? I dunno) definition of “birth.” It’s the reason why Duncan was able to kill the eponymous Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play, given the “no man of woman born” could kill Macbeth. The implication was supposed to be that Duncan came into the world by C-section, and thus wasn’t technically “born” by the cultural understanding of the time.
As a C-section child, this greatly amuses me, and so I sometimes like to privately joke to myself that I was never actually born and that my “birthday” was a sham. A conspiracy, I tell you!
Decidedly Orthogonal
Clearly we just need to carve out a day to celebrate you properly.
Nymph
I like the implication that the first part describes “being born”.
Lee
I’m not an expert but I’m p sure I’ve read about situations where one twin is a premie and one isn’t so theoretically, perhaps?
Cass
It’s not super common but yeah, if something goes wrong with birthing the second twin it might need to get swapped to an emergency C-section after the first has already been born.
Michael Steamweed
Yes indeed. Problems can arise when birthing twins. Cord around neck; breech position. Bad stuff: time to get ’em out the hard way.
anon
wonder how the other students are reacting to her blatant favoritism but i imagine they don’t rly care lol
Liara
That’s the great thing about space not carrying sound: the universe would be so flippin loud
mindbleach
It carries light, and it’s still pretty dark.
Thag Simmons
The Sun is very far away and sound doesn’t carry as well as light, so it might not be too bad?
brionl
Well, actually…
There is free gas floating around between the stars, and there are interactions between them, so there is “sound” in space. Between the stars in our galaxy the speed of sound is around 100 km/s.
There is even a star cluster that is reverberating to a single sound wave, B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C.
brionl
flingin’ flangin’ no editing:
https://www.system-sounds.com/black-hole-sound/
Buck Ripsnort
OK, when I heard that I just couldn’t help imagining a chorus of monks intoning it, and spooked the crap out of myself.
Mark
And more nearby. Cf. “solar wind”. There’s enough of it blowing past to deform our planet’s magnetosphere!
Jamie
Kinda wonder if stuff like gravitational waves count as sound.
Michael Steamweed
Yes. Not sounds we can hear but it’s all vibrations in the medium anyway. But if it were many orders of magnitude stronger, we could hear it. (and that would be bad)
yak
In the strictest sense, they aren’t. Sound is pressure waves specifically, like you wouldn’t call a ripple a sound. The equations for sound wave propagation are also of a completely different character to those for gravitational wave propagation, so a gravitational wave doesn’t necessarily have any of the properties of sound, such as the ability to bounce off solid objects, being ‘louder’ the closer you are to the source, doppler shifting, etc.
Michael Steamweed
Now with LIGO, et al, we can hear more noise! Yay! for gravitational waves!
Charles Phipps
Leslie, you need to stop putting hands on your students.
Especially autistic ones.
NGPZ
second this
like don’t touch anyone like that without consent really, autistic or not
Charles Phipps
The only time a teacher should be touching their students if they’re strangling them.
NGPZ
i mean ngl, that’s pretty justified in Mary’s case XD
Cassie
Leslie, have you ever considered thinking before you do things? Because it rather feels like you haven’t.
mindbleach
We have seen her thinking about doing stuff with people. It’s not any better for her decision-making process.
Reltzik
Would overthinking count? I think she could do overthinking.
Effie
I think you might be overthinking her overthinking.
But I think I might be overthinking you overthinking her overthinking.
Jeremiah
But if you are overthinking their overthinking over her overthinking, then who is piloting the plane?!
Cassie
It can’t be; Who is on first.
Jamie
And what’s in the copilot seat.
Michael Steamweed
IDon’tKnow.
Ed Callahan
I don’t give a dam.
He’s the catcher.
NGPZ
they go dam good with rye bread :9
Nymph
Well that’s it, I’m over thinking.
clif
Here. Have a spare Internet.
Reltzik
Huh. You might have a point. I’ll have to think it over.
Smooti
I understand Charlie perfectly. It’s very distracting.
Charles Phipps
Leslie: I will be there for you, always, Mar…oh crap.
Mary: BWahahahhahahaha.
Mark
Hm, is Mary in this class? Or is she spending all of her spare time figuring out how to graduate without taking Gender Studies or anything like it?
Michael Steamweed
Easily done; GS and such classes are almost always electives. Not required for any degree or minor. Might be required for a certificate or two.
Charles Phipps
She blogs about how its teaching woke nonsense.
Thag Simmons
The Sun’s a big place, it’s probably making a lot of sounds.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
But are things quieter at night?
Regret
*twitch*
Need to explain rising.
Quick! Close the tab!
Thag Simmons
I don’t think there are nights on the sun
Michael Steamweed
Nights on the sun are darker, sure. Quieter, no (all those mass ejections).
Cholma
Dear Dina, why did you take back the hat you gave Charlie?! At the very least, you should’ve gotten her a replacement first! (But this time, go get the hat yourself, instead of traveling with Charlie; not sure the universe could survive that)
brionl
Charlie said she wanted a different hat.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/tighter/
That was the start of their epic adventure, Hat Quest!
PedanticJerkass
The hat she ended up with after that quest was the same hat she started with… which Dina almost immediately snatched away… so yeah, Charlie still needs a hat.
True Survivor