When I stumbled on SolarBeat, I thought it would be cute and quaint and simple, and it’s all of those things, but at the same time it’s a remarkably mesmerizing little web app that puts the motion of the planets to simple notes so you can hear the music the solar system makes as planets orbit the sun. You’ll hear tons for Mercury in rapid succession, but you’ll have to wait a long long time to hear the dull tone of Neptune or Pluto (no longer a planet!) making a full orbit.

As you listen to the music, you can watch the counter at the bottom of the page to see the number of “years’ on each of those planets pass by. It’s pretty remarkable to note see that the time required for Pluto to get around the sun once is too long on Earth for any human being to live long enough to see one full Plutonian year. The longest-lived human may see a year on Uranus, but they’d have to live long to do so. It’s remarkable.

[ SolarBeat ]