Is there any sound in space? I always thought there wasnt but there is some kind of noise at the end of 311’s Transistor and on their website it says that it’s an actual recording of outer space. So what’s the deal?
Doh I’m an idiot. Can someone move this to GQ for me please? Thanks.
radio waves can travel thru space. Apollo sent back sounds from the moon. Do they count? Regular sound has no media, so the waves can’t propagate.
There shouldn’t be any sound in space, but TIE fighters make such a cool noise, they get an exemption.
I watched the space walks on NASA TV. If the astronaut’s VOX was keyed you could hear the power tools they were using.
But that sound was traveling through the astronaut… if they let go of the tool, you would not be able to hear them.
What Lurkernomore said.
The sound of the power tools used on the Moon was transmitted to the astronauts’ mikes by virtue of the fact that the astronauts were holding the tools. Sound doesn’t carry through a vacuum, but carries through objects within the vacuum.
In too many space movies we hear explosions of distant ships and the roar of passing spacecraft. The only sounds you’d really hear would be gases (and in the case of explosion, debris) hitting your own ship.
2001: A Space Odyssey did the space scenes right.
The “sounds of space” heard on that 311 album were simply audio translations of electrical signals emitted by various objects (stellar emissions, excitations of nebular matter, etc). You only hear those sounds in space if you had radio telescopes for ears.
Of course, I just thought it interesting that you could ‘hear’ the vibration through ths spacesuit.
Is there sound in space?
Sound waves do not travel in a vacuum; they need a medium to propagate. Different mediums will conduct sound in different ways.
Is there matter in space? Yes.
Is it scarcely distributed? Yes
Can sound then propagate through space? As long as there is a material medium to carry on its vibrations, yes. So, in short, sound doesn’t travel well through MOST of space, but it certainly travels through it.
How fast will it travel depends on the medium it is traversing. I assume that there is a correlation between medium density and the speed of sound, with the more tightly-packed, denser mediums facilitating a sufficiently compact molecular structure to allow for a faster transmission of sound vibrations.
Take Shoemaker-Levy 9s crash with Jupiter. Assume Earth’s atmosphere to extend uniformly (that is, conserving the air density prevalent at sea level) throughout the space separating our planet from Jupiter. Would the high-powered explosion brought about by the cosmic impact have been audible to us, back here on Earth?
This is a total WAG since I don’t have the training to calculate the sound strength of the signal upon arrival to our planet, but I would venture that we could very well have heard it using highly sensible equipment. The fact that it wasn’t heard would be indicative of the inadequacy of the thinly scattered matter comprising the space between Earth and Jupiter to properly conduct sound waves.
And, Lurker, radio waves are electromagnetic waves. As such, they can travel through a vacuum.
SPACE walk. Noreiga working on the ISS solar panels.
Well sound is probably going to follow an inverse-square law, or something like it. The waves would be so spread out by the time they got to the distance of the Earth, there wouldn’t be anything to hear. Consider the Tunguska blast of 1908. Sure, it was smaller than the SL9 crash, but it was a hell of a lot closer, and it was “only” heard for about a 500 mile radius.
Let me quote from “Astronomy: The Evolving Universe”, a fairly popular college textbook by Michael Zeilik:
Ain’t no sound going through that - what’re the odds that even two of those atoms will collide? Of course that was about the interstellar medium - can’t find a source to say what the average density between planets is, but it can’t be much better.
Moving this, per request, to General Questions.
I have no idea what “311’s Transistor” is, but if someone claims to have a sound of space, it’s probably some type of radio wave converted into sound. There is a lot of that floating around in space, and some may even have interesting modulation.