Sound Of The Universe (Planets, Sun, Moon Earth and Space)

The final frontier. And so are the sounds it makes. Yes, yes I know: there are no actual “sounds” in the spectrum of human hearing in the firmament, but we can “hear” what’s out there when the electromagnetic waves of celestial bodies like stars, moons, comets and planets are brought into the range of human hearing – and the results are truly extraordinary.

Thanks to Cassini, Voyager and Rosetta, we can encounter the music of the spheres as a physical, sonic phenomenon rather than only as an abstract philosophical concept: and the range of sub-super and hypersonic energies in space is jaw-dropping in its range, its strangeness, and even its flat-out terror. Listen to Saturn, the Sun and Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus in Nasa’s recordings to hear that implacable awesomeness.


But first, here are the clicks and calls of comet 67P, recorded by Rosetta as Philae went where few apart from Bruce Willis had been before. I find hearing these sounds simultaneously hypnotic and terrifying: being able to listen to them forms a closer physical bridge between our lives and these forces of the universe even than seeing images of the planets or the stars. And yet, there’s no comfort or consolation in the sounds they make.


However much our ears and our brains strain for meaning, connection or resonance with earthly sounds and furies in Saturn’s screams and the Sun’s drones, there is only a chilling but thrilling impassivity. We may be the cosmos made conscious, as Brian Cox puts it, but here is the cosmos made sonic …,