NASA Recorded Om Sounds from Sun: Fact Check

Story:

NASA research says Sun Sounds Om.

Other Versions

1. Aum – Music of the sun recorded by scientists.

2. Ohm the sound of sun – NASA!

Picture about NASA Recorded Om Sound from Sun — NASA Recorded Om Sound from Sun

Fact Check:

Various messages and videos circulating online claim NASA has recorded the Sounds from Sun and found them to be Om (Aum or Ohm) — the ancient, mystic sound of Hindu religion. So, let us analyze the claims in detail.

Picture of The Om Symbol — The Om Symbol

Actual Recording in 2010

In mid 2010, for the first time, astronomers at the University of Sheffield managed to record the vibrations (eerie musical harmonies) produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of Sun. Huge magnetic loops known as coronal loops were observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which behave like sound waves traveling through a wind instrument, i.e. vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

Since sound cannot travel through the near vacuum of space, scientists cannot record the sounds produced in the Sun’s atmosphere directly. So the scientists at the University of Sheffield used the satellite images of giant magnetic loops spread over thousands of miles to recreate the sound — by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up their frequencies to make them audible to the human ear. The noise from such a large and powerful source as Sun sounded as a sort of music because it has harmonics. You can see the same in the short video from a NASA space telescope TRACE (Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer) designed to study and investigate the magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun’s atmosphere. Note that the video actually shows eruptions from the solar corona, embedded with the recreated audio.

The motive of the investigation was to study the growing concerns about the increasing solar activity that can have catastrophic effects on earth. Professor Fáy-Siebenbürgen explained that studying the “music of the sun” can provide new ways of understanding and predicting solar flares before they happen. To study this and understand the power of the sun, the Faculty of Science at University of Sheffield also launched a project called ‘Project Sunshine‘.

In 2013

In a news report released in late 2013, NASA published that Voyager 1 (another space probe to study the outer Solar System) has recorded two outbursts of “interstellar plasma music” — one in Oct-Nov. 2012 and the other in April-May 2013. Both of them were excited by bursts of solar activity, and according to space physicist Don Gurnett, the principal investigator for the Plasma Wave Science instrument on Voyager 1, space can make music if you know how to listen. The second video below is a report on these findings.

Significance of Om

Om (also written as Aum or Ohm) is an ancient mantra and mystical sound of Hindu origin (India and Nepal). People consider it sacred and significant in various religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. Hindus believe all the divine and other creation form of consciousness originated from the vibration manifesting as sound “OM”. Like cross is sacred to Christians, so is Om to Hindus, which occurs in almost every Sanskrit prayer and invocation to deities.

In Vedas and other Hindu scriptures, AUM is the ‘Sound of the Sun’ and the ‘Sound of Light’. In Chandogya Upanishad (before the 8th century BCE), the holy syllable OM or udgitha was meditated as Sun God. The Mandukya Upanishad details the significance of Om saying it is the imperishable word; the past, the present, and the future.

In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, even Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum (orbital resonance) depending on their orbital revolution.

Did NASA Record Om Sounds from Sun?

The aforementioned study reports in 2010 and 2013 did show samples of sounds recorded from Sun’s atmosphere. However, none of them mentioned Om sound or such resemblance. As you can hear in the beginning of the audio in first video, only a segment of the recording (audio) sounds a bit Om-y. Apart from that, there are other sounds as well.

Some online sources like a 2010 blog article on awakenvideo.org mentioned the sound of the sun recorded by NASA to be precisely as the ancient Hindus had described it in the Vedas thousands of years ago. They say the recording is a mantra which can be intoned with human speech as “OM”. The article also featured a documentary film called ‘Quantum Communication‘. It says human communication works from the Quantum level and is connected to the Universal Laws of Attraction. Then there came up many videos even concluding that NASA recorded the Om sound from Sun.

To Conclude

NASA, as such, did not say various samples recorded from the Sun’s atmosphere sound like the sacred Hindu syllable Om. However, a segment of the audio in the beginning of first video can be interpreted as sounding Om. Some people also say Om is among the sounds recorded in deep space. It needs further studies to draw any conclusion. Nonetheless, the actual sound of Om is very grounding and peaceful. It in fact gathers and focuses our mind.