Monday, June 21, 2010

The Music of the Sun



"He [Pythagoras] declared ... that the nature of the cosmos is according to musical harmony, wherefore the sun makes his journey rhythmically." -- Hippolytus, priest, 2nd century

"He [Pythagoras] himself could hear the harmony of the Universe, and understood the universal music of the spheres, and of the stars which move in concert with them, and which we cannot hear because of the limitations of our weak nature. This is testified to by ... Empedocles." -- Porphyry, philosopher, 3rd century

"... to what Agent did the Ancients attribute the gravity of their atoms and what did they mean by calling God an harmony and comparing him & matter (the corporeal part of the Universe) to the God Pan and his Pipe?" -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 169-

In 1955 radio noises from Jupiter were detected. This was followed by radio noises from Saturn. Now we have radio noises from the Sun: Music of the sun recorded by scientists.

The sun has been the inspiration for hundreds of songs, but now scientists have discovered [sic] that the star at the centre of our solar system produces its own music.

Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time [???] the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun.

They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

1 comment:

Joseph Smidt said...

So what genre does the sun play?