How Loud is the Sun?

Unsurprisingly, being a closet geek, I love browsing through New Scientist magazine. Months and months ago now I submitted a question to a regular feature they run on the back page called “The Last Word” where readers can ask odd questions and other readers (usually scientists who are experts in the particular field to which the question relates) can answer them.
My question was along the lines of: “If the space between the Earth and the Sun was filled with air – but a hypothetical air whose only physical property was to transmit sound – then could we hear the sound of the Sun, and how loud would this be?” I had a wonderful vision in mind of the Sun peeking over the horizon every morning with a sound like some giant, yet distant, bowl of Rice Bubbles.
Well, for some months there I wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest issue of New Scientist. Then, about two months ago, I was wallowing in the air-conditioning at the Richmond Public Library, flicking through some of the issues I’d missed, when I discovered they’d published my question! Not only that, the issue I had in my hand wasn’t the one with the question, it was the later one where people have written in with answers! I was one excited little motherfucker.
But my glee was short-lived! Reading further, I discovered that to save space the editors had cut my question a little, knocking out the caveats about the hypothetical sound-carrying substance having no other physical properties. As a result a tidal wave of outraged geeks had written in attacking my question on its supposed inaccuracy, whining on and on about how the Earth couldn’t orbit the Sun with the drag created by so much air, and how that much air would collapse the solar system, and blah b’blah blah blah. One cunt had the gall to send in something saying, “The question seems to imply some sort of odd, pre-Copernican view of the solar system…” Piss off mate, I know the Sun’s at the centre. Christ.
Fine, I thought, I’ll figure it out myself then. So that’s what I spent a good deal of the weekend doing.
I started off with the idea of finding out how loud a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is, then how many megatons the energy produced by the Sun is equivalent to, then multiplying one by the other to get a decibel level for the Sun. Annoyingly though, I discovered our system for measuring sound is a bit of a bastard. The decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, which makes it very nasty to graph, so scaling the dBs from a 1-megaton nuke up to the dBs produced by the 91,467,495,219 megatons the Sun is equal to was a bit much for the addled remnants of my high school Advanced Vegie maths.
Besides that, explosions are apparently notoriously difficult to determine dBs for. The sound peaks very quickly, then trails off, and at higher dBs the sound becomes a shockwave, which behaves differently altogether.
Luckily, I found that dBs can be converted to watts and vice versa. The sun produces about 3.8e+26 watts every second, or 383 yottawatts (whatta lotta yotawatts… sorry), which, as you would expect, is an absolute pants-load of energy. This translates into 290dB, which is very loud indeed.
But, the Earth is 149,600,000 km away from the Sun. Applying the inverse square law, that tells us how sound intensity decreases with distance, I found the Sun would actually deliver about 125 dB here on the surface of the Earth – hardly a distant bowl of Rice Bubbles. 100dB is a jackhammer at 2 metres, 120 is your ear about a metre away from a train horn, and 130 is physical pain.
And what sound would you constantly hear at this excruciating level? Something like this, but immeasurably deeper: http://soi.stanford.edu/results/thr_modes_1_0_1_2_30s.au

Late night maths

Here’s a sample of the rubbish that occupies my brain at 2:30am, unable to sleep. First some background, in March 2006 I was walking with two friends when a madman jumped out of his car and tried to stab us all. He got one friend in the kidney, the other in his huge, overflowing heart, killing him, and me in the arm, severing three nerves and an artery.
Some amazing surgery managed to reattach all that, but then the nerves have had to grow back, leaving my right arm at first without movement or feeling, and now, coming up to a year later, with pretty coarse movement and feeling (though a lot better than nothing), and a sensation of pins and needles with every touch on my hand. At night though my hand often aches, and that was why I was awake. Normally I take two Panamax before bed, but that night I had decided I didn’t need to, managed to get to sleep, and then woken up because my hand was aching.
“Shit,” I thought. “I’m going to have to take these for the rest of my life.”
Now, the Victorian Government had very kindly already paid me some compensation (a bit under ten grand since I know you’re curious), but I can reapply to have that compensation changed in future, should I say, need expensive treatment that wasn’t at first evident when I made my initial claim. Lying in bed I calculated the following:
-100 Panamax at $6.00
- 6 cents per tablet, 2 tablets per night, 12 cents per day.
- $43.83 per year.
- I live for 50 more years
- $2191.15 to keep me in Panamax from now till death.

But, inflation is 3.3%! So, when I die in 2057, not only will my box of 100 Panamax now be costing me $31, I will have spent a total of $5584.22. Shit.

But, the interest rate for investments is higher than the rate of inflation! So, by awarding me a modest sum now, by investing it at, say a cautious 5%, (all this assumes we’ll still be getting 5% on our investments and inflation is 3.3% in 2057 – highly unlikely if we’re out of oil and we’re still talking about ratifying Kyoto – if that’s the case I suppose I’ll be scrounging my Panamax in some sort of urban wasteland), my future Panamax needs can be catered for by a pretty small outlay.
Just how modest a sum? $487. Shit.

Then again, I would have to invest that and then never touch it for that to work. In reality I would be withdrawing the cost of the Panamax each year. That being the case an initial investment of $1486 would do it.

Pretty bored, or pretty anal? Or perhaps Scottish?