Extending above the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun, the faint, tenuous solar corona can’t be easily seen from Earth, but it is measured to be hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere itself. The clusters of the majestic, hot coronal loops span 30 or more times the diameter of planet Earth.

Music produced by the Sun’s Atmosphere? A picture forms in my mind of a future in which the privileged few dress to the nines and hop on privately chartered space shuttles for a night at the Solar Opera. The guests would be seated in a hovering amphitheatre specially designed to withstand the sun’s heat and filter its rays, optimized for a spectacular, literally out-of-this-world light & sound show… The reality is a bit less romantic, but still pretty amazing.

Astronomers recorded sound waves emitted by the looping magnetic fields along the Sun’s outer regions, or the corona, which carries magnetic sound waves. Unfortunately, we humans can’t hear these sounds since our hearing range is between 20 to 20,000 hertz, while the solar sound waves are more along the lines of milli-hertz-a-thousandth of a hertz.

I don’t quite understand all of this, as to my chagrin, I’m not smart enough to grasp astrophysics, but I’m going to try my best to break down what I do understand in layman’s terms:

One of the astronomers likens this phenomenon to the solar energy plucking a guitar string. Explosive events at the sun’s surface produce acoustic waves that bounce back and forth between the ends of the loops, setting up “standing waves.” So imagine a guitar string being plucked by microflares (tiny, frequently occurring solar flares) which produce sound waves that reach tens of miles, traveling at speeds of 45,000 – 90,000 miles per hour, releasing the energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs. (Considering that the speed of sound on Earth at sea level in static conditions is about 761 miles per hour, it boggles the mind!)

Forget the opera, this sounds like one hell of a badass rock concert. Too bad we can’t hear it.

This study will be presented at this week’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Lancashire, England. Read more about this on Yahoo News >>