• superkret@feddit.org
    571·
    15 hours ago

    Fun fact: If there was air between us and the sun to carry sound, we would constantly hear it roaring at around 100dB (as loud as a jackhammer).

    • Jumi@lemmy.world
      9·
      8 hours ago

      Another fun fact: If we could hear the sun and it would suddenly disappear we would still hear it for another 13 to 14 years.

      • toynbee@lemmy.world
        10·
        8 hours ago

        Not eight minutes and twenty seconds?

        Not even an edit: I typed this then realized I was thinking of the speed of light, not sound. Sorry for doubting you.

    • MattW03@lemmy.caEnglish
      34·
      14 hours ago

      More fun facts: When the stars are right In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will awake from his slumber enter in his red giant phase and devour engulf Mercury, Venus, and possibly also the Earth.

      • pressanykeynow@lemmy.world
        41·
        6 hours ago

        It will eat Earth and at some point the heat will likely make all the planets and their satellites unsuitable for humans. There might be a possibility for life on Pluto though.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 hours ago

        And some previous sun(s), after growing into even larger red giants, created most of the matter you see around you in an act of such violence it likely destroyed any planets they hadn’t devoured.

        And some of what it created still contains enough rage to make the most violent creations humanity had made–up to the point when we realized we could use that to power an even more violent creation: a brief and miniature version of our slumbering sun.

        • Mac@mander.xyz
          1·
          8 hours ago

          Who’s to say it’s doing something vocally at all? Perhaps it’s simply breathing but our feeble biology cannot handle its immense power.

      • superkret@feddit.org
        101·
        14 hours ago

        Cause it’s basically an ongoing explosion.
        And supposedly it would sound something like a huge waterfall.

        • Jax@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          8 hours ago

          I can’t help but wonder what effect that would have on life. Assuming that there’s a circumstance where a form of life can somehow be exposed to the infinite roar of its benevolent tyrant - what would that do to hearing? Would life even develop hearing? I can’t imagine things like echolocation would be very useful, but I’m just some dude thinking about our eldritch sun god. Idk.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
          12·
          8 hours ago

          No, it is not an ongoing explosion. It is in equilibrium, an explosion is not, that is it’s defining thing. Why should it sound like water when the processes happen on far larger scales (lower frequencies)? They should almost exclusively be inaudible.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    10·
    13 hours ago

    Dammit I must have clicked outside my subscriptions again.

    So anyway here’s a reminder that if you take a stellar lifetime and map it down to something like a human lifetime, the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.

    This means that stars, at least in close proximity to each other, could theoretically be having conversations (by means of light across vacuum) that to them, don’t seem to take all that long at all.

    And they have all that boiling mass doing who knows what and so much real time to think…

    • dwindling7373@feddit.itEnglish
      11·
      12 hours ago

      the relative slowness of the speed of light mostly goes away, down to something within an reasonable approximation of the speed of sound in air, give or take.

      Nice try buddy, the ratio is 138 times higher for stars / lightspeed than it is human / soundspeed, not to mention the distance at which we have conversations is 1 human wide, clearly not the same between stars.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        3·
        10 hours ago

        I admit it’s been a while since I did the calculations so I must have misremembered the speed of sound part.

        Trying again now (with less brain than I once had) I think you could still get a few million intercommunications between stars hundreds of light years apart within their lifespans, and stars only a handful of light years apart could be even more chatty.

      • lunarul@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 hours ago

        You’re comparing based on size. I think lifespan would be more relevant. Let’s compare a 10 billion year lifespan to a 100 year lifespan. That makes 1 year of human life equivalent to 100 million years of a star’s life. So a distance of 10 light years would mean 10 years for a message to get across. Which, at the 1 to 100 million time rate difference, still means an equivalent of 3 seconds. So yeah, communication would be slower than for humans, even for relatively close neighbors.