It cuts through the solar system at about 1.6 million kilometers per hour, hitting everything in its path. It is the solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the Sun’s upper atmosphere, called the solar corona. This plasma consists mainly of electrons, protons, and alpha particles.
And thanks to the Parker Solar Probe mission we now have a taste of what that sounds like.
Parker Solar Probe
An instrument aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission is able to ‘hear’ the interaction of waves and particles that make up the solar wind: through the roar of the wind, we can hear the small squeaks and whispers that hint at the origin of this wind.
You can hear it in the following video from the Johns Hopkins University Aplied Physics Laboratory (APL):
This NASA mission to the immediate vicinity of the Sun can "hear" when waves and particles interact with each other, recording frequency and amplitude information about these plasma waves that scientists could reproduce as sound waves .
The solar wind forms a "bubble" in the interstellar medium (hydrogen and helium gas in intergalactic space). The point at which the force exerted by the solar wind is not large enough to displace the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause and is considered to be the outermost "edge" of the solar system.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission took off in August 2018 towards the Sun. In November of that same year and in April 2019 it made two approaches to our star, approaching about 24 million kilometers (less than half the distance that Mercury orbits from the Sun).
