If the sun were to go out it would take 8 minutes for the light to stop but 13 years for the sound to stop.
Kind of like when you kill an enderman. π€
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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I guess the sun being loud shouldn't really be all that strange; if I recall correctly the sun has explosions happening on it everywhere all the time, the strange part though is the whole sound lasting for thirteen years part.
A bullet fired from a gun goes more or less at Mach 1, correct?
It's thirteen years to the sun at the speed of a bullet?
Spacecraft towards Mercury, or the Parker Solar Probe go much faster than that, take a few years to make it there, but they are doing so picking up speed in flybys of first Earth, then Venus, then Mercury, in several, ever tighter orbits.
It's both fun and illuminating to try and visualize these things in new ways. In this case, from the viewpoint of a bullet.
You wouldn't, of course. Hearing, the way we hear, in such an environment would be useless. We wouldn't have evolved that. This is like saying "ultraviolet radiation from the sun would be everywhere, all the time, can you imagine?" It is everywhere all the time, but as such it isn't a useful sense to possess, so we don't.
This also makes some very weird assumptions about what the sound would be like. If space were a medium sound could travel through then it would--like all mediums capable of carrying a sound wave--alter the wave in many ways. Intensity, frequency, etc. But since we don't know what kind of medium that would be, and since the comment doesn't posit any particular medium, we don't know what the sound would sound like or even how loud it would be.
I assume that this thought experiment posits a space filled with the same average density of particles found at ground level on Earth. Obviously such a thing is nonsensical, but it serves to illuminate one aspect of the raw power of the Sun that we ignore, because we're insulated from it by 93 million miles of vacuum.
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imagine living on a cold dead earth for thirteen years
you'd be dead in a week
This seems like bullshit to me. I don't think the noise level of the sun is something we have solid data on
The sun apparently vibrates, but at frequencies too low to hear anyway. https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/sounds-of-the-sun/
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Evolution would say: nope. And the surviving class would be deaf. No one is able to accept a permanent jackhammer.
Evolution might just block out certain frequencies. No need to go completely deaf.
Like the frequency dying plants make? Makes sense. Looks like evolution could already did this in the past.
Wait you mean you guys can't hear that?
Thanks for making me aware π
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Dang, we'd have to wear ear protection all day!
If it takes 13 years for sound how long would it take for us to reach the sun on a rocket
Interesting question.
You'd have to cancel out the sideway movement of the earth, and it's going roughly 85000km an hour.
Once you cancel that out, you'll simply fall down to the sun. But you'd need a very powerful rocket. It's way easier to get to mars, as comparison.
It's more realistic to do gravity assists from venus and other bodies, and in that case it'd take years. Just a rough guesstimate would be 10 years I guess? But maybe you'd have to even sling past jupiter or something to really slow down, so then it might be decades.
If the planets line up correctly, you can do it in way less, like 4 or 5 months. I'd need to get some orbital calculations out for the whole thing
But simplest case, you lower your perihel to Venus orbit, that'll take you less than half a year. With a perfect gravity assist you can then head straight for the sun at more than orbital speed, accelerating as you go. Free fall time is a fraction of orbit time, and you're going in with a high initial velocity, so a month or two more, max. That's 6-9 months total, but it'll be faster with more Ξv
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Wow I didn't think it'd be that complicated haha, I imagined we'd just swirl towards it like going down thr toilet
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We can go faster than sound that's what a sonic boom is.
I thought a Sonic boom was when Sonic drops the mic
Guile enters the chat
π¨βπ³π€π»
Thatβs funteresting to think about.
When I was little, I thought the sound of cicadas came from the sun.
They always did seem to get louder when a wave of heat would roll over the area.