The Music of the Spheres: The Singing Sun

Did you know the sun rings, almost like a bell?  It’s even been called the singing sun!

Since space is airless we can’t hear the sounds, but scientists say the sun is ringing, nonetheless.  Convection, or rising heat similar to a boiling pot (which can be quite noisy), generates huge bubbles on the surface of the sun.

The surface moves and roils, vibrating sound waves are trapped and filtered within the sun, and it rings!  It takes about two hours for the acoustical waves to travel from one side of the sun to the other, and in the process they cause the sun’s surface to oscillate.  Astronomers track these oscillations with special equipment in order to learn about the sun’s interior.  But they can also speed up the oscillations, which are way too low for us to hear, and recreate the sounding sun for us.  Here is a link to some of these recreations.

http://soi.stanford.edu/results/sounds.html

Did you know that the ancient Greeks believed in what they called the music of the spheres?  The solar system, they thought, was made up of ten hollow spheres—the planets and stars—that revolved in concentric circles around a central fire—the sun.  Each sphere generated a sound; the inner spheres spun off lower tones, and the outer spheres, since they whirled more quickly, spun off higher tones.  And these tones intertwined in harmony, the music of the spheres, which couldn’t be heard but could be expressed via numbers, such as those found in the musical ratios that create an octave or a fifth, for example.

You can find this model of the revolving spheres in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  You can find the proportional use and study of numbers in Renaissance and Baroque architecture, in the music of Bach (one of the great passions of my life), in early Christian theology, even in the natural sciences, such as the number of petals in a flower as expressed in the Fibonacci series.  Many centuries later the 17^th-century German mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler, drew a model of the universe based on this very idea.

Isn’t it fascinating that maybe, just maybe, the ancients were on to something!

"The Sun is playing a secret melody, hidden inside itself, that produces a widespread throbbing motion of its surface. The sounds are coursing through the Sun's interior, causing the entire globe, or parts of it, to move in and out, slowly and rhythmically like the regular rise and fall of tides in a bay or of a beating heart." (Kenneth R. Lang)

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic director and conductor

Master Chorus Eastside