On Saturday, Kiran Bedi became the butt of online ridicule for claiming that the Sun emitted the sound Om.
It’s the WhatsApp forward before the era of WhatsApp forwards which has often been emailed from continent to continent by the same people who believe Sanskrit is the most scientific language for coding and that 58% employees in NASA are Indians.
Now sound cannot emit in space, since it travels through vibrations of atoms and molecules in a medium, while space has no air or any other molecule.
However, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory designed to study the internal structure of the sun, the extensive outer atmosphere and the origin of the solar wind, did ‘hear’ the Sun.
A solar observatory was used to measure the sun’s vibrations, which was later translated into sound. It helped scientists study everything from solar flares to coronary mass ejections.
While there’s no sound emitting from it for the human ear, there are waves travelling and bouncing inside the sun which is like a low, pulsing heartbeat.
"Waves are traveling and bouncing around inside the sun, and if your eyes were sensitive enough, they could actually see this," Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement.
"We don't have straightforward ways to look inside the sun. We don't have a microscope to zoom inside the sun, so using a star or the sun's vibrations allows us to see inside of it," Young continued.
He further explained: “When anything material moves, waves travel through it, and the same thing happens inside the Sun. The Sun is vibrating at lots of different frequencies. We don't have straightforward ways to look inside the Sun...so using a star or the Sun's natural vibrations allows us to see inside of it."
