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There are some people that believe that a 528Hz tone has healing properties, for instance this website and this one. One of the claims behind this frequency is, from the first source:

NASA scientists recorded the sound of the sun, that can be heard to waffle around 528Hz

Similarly from the second:

According to Dr. Leonard Horowitz, a pioneer in the search for the “lost” Solfeggio frequencies, 528 Hz resonates at the heart of everything that exists in the Universe, including the sun, pyramids, circles, squares, rainbows and snowflakes.

Searching for Dr. Leonard Horowitz led me to this page, which describes him as a former dentist and makes no mention of him having ever worked for NASA.

After trying to find what they could be referring to when they say "NASA scientists recorded the sound of the sun at 528 Hz," I could only find this PDF which mentions 528 Hz on the fourth page, but the topic of the paper doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with the Sun.

  1. Did NASA scientists record the sound of the sun?
  2. If so, does the sound of the sun "waffle around 528 Hz"?

I'm not trying to address the claims made regarding any of the healing properties of a 528 Hz tone, I just want to know what it is that they are referencing when they claim that the Sun somehow fits into it.

Jeff Lambert
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    What does the "sound" of the sun mean? In what way does it "waffle" or "resonate"? (And I'd love to hear how an abstract circle or square can resonate at a concrete frequency…) – Kevin Jun 07 '18 at 17:24
  • @Kevin I'm not entirely sure on any of those questions, but if there is a paper by NASA measuring a sound frequency of the sun it may address at least what they could mean by "sound" and "resonate." – Jeff Lambert Jun 07 '18 at 17:31
  • The [related question](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8377/does-528-hz-facilitate-dna-repair) has an answer that comes close to addressing this. The claim here doesn't mean anything, so it is hard to know how to address it. – Oddthinking Jun 07 '18 at 18:30
  • @Oddthinking I'm hunting for whatever basis it is that they could be using NASA as an appeal to authority for, to see if there is in fact any truth behind a connection between the frequency of 528 Hz and the Sun, though I imagine NASA has produced a good sized body of work about the Sun so it may be something quite obscure or actually even the one PDF I did find. – Jeff Lambert Jun 07 '18 at 18:36
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    This needs a "woo" tag, if one existed. If ever there was a claim that fit..... – PoloHoleSet Jun 07 '18 at 20:48
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    AN interesting point in the first article is that it combines 528 nm wavelength with 528 Hz frequency - indicating that the number 299 792 458 in the definition of the meter is a sort of fundamental constant and not something made up to match historical definitions.... – piet.t Jun 08 '18 at 06:20
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    @piet.t - can you quote this combination you speak of? I don't see it on the first linked site. First of all, frequency, wavelength and the speed of light are all linked together, so there will always be a relationship between them. However, the wavelength of 528 Hz is nowhere near 528 nm or vice versa. The frequency for that wavelength is around 567,788.75 GHz (gigaherz, so multiply by a billion to get to Hz). – PoloHoleSet Jun 11 '18 at 18:59
  • @PoloHoleSet It says: "Much evidence suggests 528nm of light corresponds to 528Hz frequency of sound" - so there seems to be some "natural" corresponce between our arbitrarily chosen units of length and frequency/time - i.e. the numerical value of the speed of light. – piet.t Jun 12 '18 at 05:58
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    @piet.t - So, really, nothing other than some vague suggested mumbo-jumbo. Okay, fair enough. I don't find that all that interesting (compared to any actual evidence of a correspondence). (speed of light) = frequency X wavelength, for all electro-magnetic radiation, FYI. I'm not sure how one claims a relationship between EMR and sound waves that are nowhere near each other in frequency. Apparently they aren't sure how that would work, either. – PoloHoleSet Jun 12 '18 at 20:11

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No, it seems that the 528hz claim is either completely made up, or at best based off of recordings artificially adjusted to be heard by humans. The Sun simply doesn't oscillate that quickly or that consistently for the claim to be believable.


Why 528hz is not realistic: Helioseismology is both an awesome word and the research field concerned with studying the internal structure of the Sun through its oscillations. These oscillations operate as fairly regular waves that travel throughout the sun, and 'fairly regular waves' is essentially what sound is.

However, as explained at this Stanford site(careful, it automatically downloads a sound file of the Sun for some reason), there are many overlapping waves moving through the Sun and they take hours to complete a cycle.

Because of the time it takes the waves to travel through the interior of the sun, the oscillations are measured in the milli- or micro-Hertz, several orders of magnitude smaller that 528hz. This paper describes how the largest interior solar oscillations aren't more than a few millihertz:

The Sun's oscillations are observed in line-of-sight Doppler velocity measurements over the visible solar disk, and also in measurements of variations of its continuum intensity of radiation caused by compression of the radiating gas by the waves... The largest-amplitude modes have frequencies of around 3 mHz.

This paper gives similar values in its abstract:

...from 1,000 to 4,000 µHz, the spectral lines closely match the frequencies of known solar pressure modes.

To reach a 528hz frequency, these waves would have to complete their trip through the Sun 528 times per second, not once every few hours. I haven't done the math, but I assume a million kilometers per second is a bit above the speed of sound within the Sun.

Possible origin of the claim: I couldn't find any NASA papers discussing 528hz and the Sun. The only potential source of the claim that I could find are videos of sped-up recordings of these waves, such as this video. Part of the first sound clip does sound a bit like 528hz(it's basically that classic 'Om' sound you hear from people meditating). However, as explained on the Standford site, these 'sound recordings' are weeks worth of oscillations compressed into a few seconds of video, and it's a small segment of the many, many waves travelling through the Sun at any time.

Considering the other flowery, exaggerated, and unsourced claims on the site, it can be safely assumed that this claim is equally without merit.

Giter
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    Never mind the speed of sound: 'millions of kilometers per second' is a bit above the speed of light in a vacuum – Tom Goodfellow Jun 08 '18 at 06:34
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    "To reach a 528hz frequency, these waves would have to complete their trip through the Sun 528 times per second" I can't see where your reference makes this claim, and I don't believe it is true. Can you please elaborate or remove? (Counter-argument: An earthquake makes a lot of noise at frequencies faster than the diameter of the earth / speed of sound.) – Oddthinking Jun 08 '18 at 14:24
  • @Oddthinking: That's just the definition of a Hertz: 1 cycle per second, so 528hz is 528 cycles per second. So, the waves would either need to be incredibly small or incredibly fast to hit 528 cycles/second. I just added in some papers demonstrating the the biggest solar oscillations are measured in millihertz. – Giter Jun 08 '18 at 14:52
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    @Giter: I'm worried we are talking past each other or about different things here. You seem to be saying the minimum the wave-length of a sound travelling through a medium is equal to the length of the medium. Is that right? If so, I don't think it is true. – Oddthinking Jun 08 '18 at 14:59
  • @Oddthinking: Yeah, I think it's just me not being clear/making a broad claim. Frequency is the speed of the wave divided by the wavelength, and the measured frequencies are <5mhz. To reach a 528hz frequency, the waves need to be *much* faster than the speed of sound in the sun and/or have incredibly small wavelengths, neither of which seem realistic. – Giter Jun 08 '18 at 15:15
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    Aside: In my attempt to find a broad range for the speed of sound in the Sun, I found a 1989 paper on [exactly this](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1989SvAL...15...21V), but having paged through it, I *still* don't know. – Oddthinking Jun 08 '18 at 15:46
  • @Oddthinking "Resonate" implies that the wavelength is the same order of magnitude as the diameter. – Acccumulation Jun 08 '18 at 22:09