Music of the Sun

Four hundred years after Kepler discovered his third law of planetary motion, disproving the Pythagorean notion of ‘the music of the spheres’, music was discovered in the Sun. With this discovery the science of helioseismology was born. Just as we can see the face of a foetus in the womb via ultrasound, and as bats can ‘see’ their way around using sonar, helioseismologists can now see inside the depths of the sun simply by listening to it. In The Music of the Sun, renowned helioseismologist William Chaplin tells the story of this discipline’s origins and gives us invaluable insight into its implications – not only for better understanding the distant sun and stars – but for cosmology, particle physics, and the very relationship between the Sun and the Earth.