How close to the Sun would you have to be to hear it?

Taken from this fascinating answer:

The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That's something like 10x to 100x the power flux through the speakers at a rock concert, or out the front of a police siren. Except the "speaker surface" in this case is the entire surface of the Sun, some 10,000 times larger than the surface area of Earth.

We know what the Sun "sounds" like - instruments like SDO's HMI or SOHO's MDI or the ground-based GONG observatory measure the Doppler shift everywhere on the visible surface of the Sun, and we can actually see sound waves (well, infrasound waves) resonating in the Sun as a whole! Since the Sun is large, the sound waves resonate at very deep frequencies - typical resonant modes have 5 minute periods, and there are about a million of them going all at once.

How close to the Sun would you have to be to hear it with normal human ears?

Lets assume you are in a spaceship similar to what we can produce today, would an astronaut inside the spaceship be able to hear the roar of the sun if that spaceship was in a very close orbit to the Sun?

Would you be able to hear the Sun from Mercury? (Did Mariner 10 or Messenger hear the Sun from that range?)

Is it realistic, in whilst writing Sci-Fi, to say that someone near a star could hear all this noise and energy coming from that star?

posted over 5 years ago

Jimmery‭

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