Hear the Sun Sing...

Have you ever wondered what the Sun would sound like if you could hear it?
Our Sun lies 93,000,000 miles away, surrounded by the vacuum of space.
Sound won't travel through space, of course. But with the right
instrument, scientists can "hear" pulsations from the Sun.
The entire Sun vibrates from a complex pattern of acoustical waves,
much like a bell. If your eyes were sharp enough, you could see a
bell's surface jiggle in complex patterns as the waves bounced around
within it.

Likewise, astronomers at Stanford University can record acoustical
pressure waves in the Sun by carefully tracking movements on the Sun's
surface. To do this, they use an instrument called a Michelson Doppler
Imager (MDI), mounted on the SOHO spacecraft, circling the Sun
1,000,000 miles from Earth.

The Sun's acoustical waves bounce from one side of the Sun to the
other in about two hours, causing the Sun's surface to oscillate, or
wiggle up and down. Because these sound waves travel underneath the
Sun's surface, they are influenced by conditions inside the Sun. So
scientists can use the oscillations to learn more about how the
structure of the Sun's interior shapes its surface.

The Sun's sound waves are normally at frequencies too low for the
human ear to hear. To be able to hear them, the scientists sped up the
waves 42,000 times -- and compressed 40 days of vibrations into a few
seconds. What you'll be hearing are just a few dozen of the 10 million
resonances echoing inside the Sun.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/singing/