Can sounds be heard in outer space? Is there sound in space?
And what do we hear in space anyway? Is it possible that a person in space would not hear a spaceship rush past him? Did you know that space also has its own weather? And since there are practically no such substances in interstellar space, sound cannot move through this space. Let's look at this in more detail: As we know, radio waves can travel through space.
Once your radio receives the signal, it converts it into sound that will travel quietly through the air in your spacesuit. You're flying in space in a spacesuit, and you accidentally hit your helmet on a space telescope.
You decided to go into space, when you suddenly remembered that you forgot to put on your spacesuit. Your face will immediately be pressed against the shuttle, there will be no air left in your ears, so you will not be able to hear anything. However, before the “steel shackles” of space strangle you, you will be able to make out several sounds through bone conduction.
You can write and post an article on the portal.
Since there is no need for air in this case, you will hear the conversations of your colleagues in the shuttle for another 15 seconds. Perhaps you will hear minimal sound coming through your own body. However, you won’t be able to create it because it also requires air.
08/09/2008 21:37 of course. It’s all Hollywood directors who are messing with people’s brains with scenes and shots in space. In space it’s impossible to feel speed or sound or anything else!!
To humans - no Sound is periodic pressure fluctuations that propagate in any medium, for example in a gas. For us to hear sound, it must be loud enough. If a person were in interplanetary or interstellar space, he would not hear anything (however, a person, in principle, cannot be there). In modern cinemas, the special effects are simply breathtaking. A person sits in an ordinary chair and truly enjoys watching a new action film, a new science fiction film.
It seems to you that the enemy is directing the laser at you, and not at the ship in the film, and the chair shakes every now and then, as if “your” spaceship is being attacked from all sides. Everything we see and hear strikes our imagination, and we ourselves become the main characters of this film. However, in most movies, such as Star Wars and Star Trek, sound effects for many of the combat scenes in outer space are simply abundant.
In addition, a flight into space is a difficult test for the person himself, because some people in space begin to experience something like seasickness. There are special scientists who make weather forecasts in space. Next we will talk about how sound moves and why a person perceives it.
02.02.2012 00:40Did you go to school at all? There is a technical and physical vacuum
In a vacuum, they can only fly in a straight line if they do not have steering engines. 03/22/2010 22:05 Nya, no, if you look at the universe not as a dark, black ball in which galaxies, planets, asteroids, etc. float. There is a vacuum in your head. If you are interested in what is really happening in space, watch documentaries, not science fiction films. 05/14/2012 10:23 people, does anyone know what happened before the big bang! They say that at that time our universe fit into a small point the size of a pinhead!
Plus there is an interesting “Casimir Effect”, which seems to have been proven, which means a wave effect is possible even in a vacuum, which seems to hint... In its original understanding, the Greek term “cosmos” (order, world order) had a philosophical basis, defining a hypothetical closed vacuum around The Earth is the center of the Universe.
This all indicates that no matter how sophisticated Hollywood filmmakers try to explain audible sounds in space, all the same, as proven above, a person does not hear anything in space.
To the question: sound in space. please explain, will a person hear his own voice in outer space?)) asked by the author Ivan Grabi the best answer is As we already know, sound waves can only travel through matter. And since there are practically no such substances in interstellar space, sound cannot move through this space. The distance between the particles is so great that they will never collide with each other. Therefore, even if you were close to the explosion of a spaceship in this space, you would not hear a sound. From a technical point of view, this statement can be disputed; one can try to prove that a person can still hear sounds in space.
Let's look at this in more detail: As we know, radio waves can travel through space. This means that if you find yourself in space and put on a spacesuit with a radio receiver, your friend will be able to transmit to you a radio signal that, for example, pizza has been brought to the space station, and you will actually hear it. And you will hear it because radio waves are not mechanical, they are electromagnetic. Electromagnetic waves can transmit energy through a vacuum. Once your radio receives the signal, it converts it into sound that will travel quietly through the air in your spacesuit.
-- let's consider another case: You are flying in space in a spacesuit, and accidentally hit your helmet on a space telescope. According to the idea, as a result of the collision, sound should be heard, since in this case there is a medium for sound waves: the helmet and the air in the spacesuit. But despite this, you will still be surrounded by vacuum, so an independent observer will not hear a sound, even if you bang your head against the satellite many times.
-- imagine that you are an astronaut and you are assigned to perform a certain task.
You decided to go into space, when you suddenly remembered that you forgot to put on your spacesuit. Your face will immediately be pressed against the shuttle, there will be no air left in your ears, so you will not be able to hear anything. However, before the “steel shackles” of space strangle you, you will be able to make out several sounds through bone conduction. In bone conduction, sound waves travel through the bones of the jaw and skull to the inner ear, bypassing the eardrum. Since there is no need for air in this case, you will hear the conversations of your colleagues in the shuttle for another 15 seconds. After this, you will probably lose consciousness and begin to suffocate.
This all indicates that no matter how sophisticated Hollywood filmmakers try to explain audible sounds in space, all the same, as proven above, a person does not hear anything in space.
Contrary to established ideas, interplanetary and interstellar space is not filled with vacuum, that is, with absolute emptiness. Particles of gas and dust are present in it, remaining after various space disasters, are present in it. These particles form clouds, which in some areas form a medium dense enough for the propagation of sound vibrations, although at frequencies inaccessible to human perception. So let's find out if we can hear the sounds of space.
This article is introductory; more information can be found in the link above.
About 220 million light-years from the Sun, at the center around which many galaxies orbit, lies an unusually heavy black hole. It produces the lowest-frequency sounds of all existing ones. This sound is more than 57 octaves below middle C, which is about a billion times a million below the frequencies audible to the human ear.
This discovery was made in 2003 by a NASA orbital telescope, which discovered in the Perseus cluster the presence of concentric rings of darkness and light, similar to the circles on the surface of a lake from a stone thrown into it. According to astrophysicists, this phenomenon is explained by the influence of extremely low frequency sound waves. The brighter areas correspond to wave peaks where the interstellar gas is under maximum pressure. Dark rings correspond to “dips,” that is, areas of low pressure.
Sounds observed visually
The rotation of heated and magnetized interstellar gas around the black hole is similar to a whirlpool forming over a drain. As the gas rotates, it generates an electromagnetic field that is powerful enough to accelerate it and accelerate it to sub-light speeds as it approaches the surface of the black hole. In this case, huge bursts (called relativistic jets) appear, forcing the gas flow to change direction.
This process generates eerie cosmic sounds that spread through the entire Perseus cluster to distances of up to 1 million light years. Since sound can only travel through a medium with a density not lower than a threshold value, after the concentration of gas particles decreases sharply at the edge of the cloud in which the Perseus galaxies are located, the propagation of these sounds stops. Thus, these sounds cannot be heard here on Earth, but they can be seen by observing processes in a gas cloud. To a first approximation, it is similar to external observation of a transparent but soundproof camera.
Unusual planet
When a powerful earthquake hit northeastern Japan in March 2011 (its magnitude was 9.0), seismic stations throughout the Earth recorded the formation and passage of waves through the Earth, which caused low-frequency vibrations (sounds) in the atmosphere. The fluctuations reached a point where ESA's research vessel Gravity Field and the GOCE satellite were comparing the level of gravity on the Earth's surface and at altitudes corresponding to low orbits.
A satellite located 270 km above the surface of the planet recorded these sounds. This was done thanks to the presence of ultra-high sensitivity accelerometers, the main purpose of which is to control the ion propulsion system, designed to ensure the stability of the spacecraft’s orbit. It was the accelerometers that on March 11, 2011 recorded a vertical displacement in the rarefied atmosphere surrounding the satellite. In addition, wave-like changes in pressure were observed during the propagation of sounds generated by the earthquake.
The motors were commanded to compensate for the displacement, which was successfully completed. And in the memory of the on-board computer, information was preserved that was essentially a recording of infrasound caused by the earthquake. This recording was initially classified, but later it was published by a scientific group led by R. F. Garcia.
The very first sounds of the universe
A very long time ago, shortly after the formation of our universe, approximately the first 760 million years after the Big Bang, the Universe was a very dense environment and sound vibrations could easily propagate in it. At the same time, the first photons of light began their endless journey. Then the medium began to cool, and this process was accompanied by the condensation of atoms from subatomic particles.
Using Light
Ordinary light helps determine the presence of sound vibrations in outer space. Passing through any medium, sound waves cause oscillatory changes in pressure in it. When compressed, the gas heats up. On a cosmic scale, this process is so powerful that it causes the birth of stars. When expanding, due to a decrease in pressure, the gas cools.
Acoustic vibrations passing through the space of the young universe provoked small fluctuations in pressure, which were reflected in its temperature regime. Physicist D. Cramer from the University of Washington (USA) used changes in the temperature background to reproduce this cosmic music, which accompanied the intense expansion of the universe. After the frequency was increased by 1026 times, it became perceptible to the human ear.
So, although sounds in osmosis do exist, are published and spread, they can only be heard after they are recorded by other methods, reproduced and subjected to appropriate processing.
Space is not a homogeneous nothingness. There are clouds of gas and dust between various objects. They are the remnants of supernova explosions and the site of star formation. In some areas, this interstellar gas is dense enough to propagate sound waves, but they are imperceptible to human hearing.
Is there sound in space?
When an object moves - be it the vibration of a guitar string or an exploding firework - it affects nearby air molecules, as if pushing them. These molecules crash into their neighbors, and those, in turn, into the next ones. Movement travels through the air like a wave. When it reaches the ear, a person perceives it as sound.
When a sound wave passes through air, its pressure fluctuates up and down, like seawater in a storm. The time between these vibrations is called the frequency of sound and is measured in hertz (1 Hz is one oscillation per second). The distance between the highest pressure peaks is called the wavelength.
Sound can only travel in a medium in which the wavelength is no greater than the average distance between particles. Physicists call this the “conditionally free road” - the average distance that a molecule travels after colliding with one and before interacting with the next. Thus, a dense medium can transmit sounds with a short wavelength and vice versa.
Long wavelength sounds have frequencies that the ear perceives as low tones. In a gas with a mean free path greater than 17 m (20 Hz), the sound waves will be too low frequency for humans to perceive. They are called infrasounds. If there were aliens with ears that could hear very low notes, they would know exactly whether sounds were audible in outer space.
Song of the Black Hole
Some 220 million light years away, at the center of a cluster of thousands of galaxies, hums the deepest note the universe has ever heard. 57 octaves below middle C, which is about a million billion times deeper than the frequency a person can hear.
The deepest sound that humans can detect has a cycle of about one vibration every 1/20 of a second. The black hole in the constellation Perseus has a cycle of about one fluctuation every 10 million years.
This became known in 2003, when NASA's Chandra Space Telescope discovered something in the gas filling the Perseus cluster: concentrated rings of light and darkness, like ripples in a pond. Astrophysicists say these are traces of incredibly low-frequency sound waves. The brighter ones are the tops of the waves, where the pressure on the gas is greatest. The darker rings are depressions where the pressure is lower.
Sound you can see
Hot, magnetized gas swirls around the black hole, similar to water swirling around a drain. As it moves, it creates a powerful electromagnetic field. Strong enough to accelerate gas near the edge of a black hole to almost the speed of light, turning it into huge bursts called relativistic jets. They force the gas to turn sideways on its path, and this effect causes eerie sounds from space.
They are carried through the Perseus cluster hundreds of thousands of light years from their source, but the sound can only travel as far as there is enough gas to carry it. So he stops at the edge of the gas cloud filling Perseus. This means that it is impossible to hear its sound on Earth. You can only see the effect on the gas cloud. It looks like looking through space into a soundproof chamber.
Strange planet
Our planet emits a deep groan every time its crust moves. Then there is no doubt whether sounds travel in space. An earthquake can create vibrations in the atmosphere with a frequency of one to five Hz. If it's strong enough, it can send infrasonic waves through the atmosphere into outer space.
Of course, there is no clear boundary where the Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins. The air simply gradually becomes thinner until it eventually disappears altogether. From 80 to 550 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the free path of a molecule is about a kilometer. This means that the air at this altitude is approximately 59 times thinner than at which it would be possible to hear sound. It is only capable of transmitting long infrasound waves.
When a magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan's northeast coast in March 2011, seismographs around the world recorded its waves traveling through the Earth, its vibrations causing low-frequency oscillations in the atmosphere. These vibrations travel all the way to where the Gravity Field and stationary satellite Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) compares the Earth's gravity in low orbit to 270 kilometers above the surface. And the satellite managed to record these sound waves.
GOCE has very sensitive accelerometers on board that control the ion thruster. This helps keep the satellite in a stable orbit. GOCE's 2011 accelerometers detected vertical shifts in the very thin atmosphere around the satellite, as well as wave-like shifts in air pressure, as sound waves from the earthquake propagated. The satellite's engines corrected the displacement and stored the data, which became a kind of recording of the infrasound of the earthquake.
This entry was kept secret in the satellite data until a group of scientists led by Rafael F. Garcia published this document.
The first sound in the universe
If it were possible to go back in time, to about the first 760,000 years after the Big Bang, it would be possible to find out whether there was sound in space. At this time, the Universe was so dense that sound waves could travel freely.
Around the same time, the first photons began to travel through space as light. Afterwards, everything finally cooled enough to condense into atoms. Before cooling occurred, the Universe was filled with charged particles - protons and electrons - that absorbed or scattered photons, the particles that make up light.
Today it reaches Earth as a faint glow from the microwave background, visible only to very sensitive radio telescopes. Physicists call this cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the oldest light in the universe. It answers the question of whether there is sound in space. The cosmic microwave background contains a recording of the oldest music in the universe.
Light to the rescue
How does light help us know if there is sound in space? Sound waves travel through air (or interstellar gas) as pressure fluctuations. When gas is compressed, it gets hotter. On a cosmic scale, this phenomenon is so intense that stars are formed. And when the gas expands, it cools. Sound waves traveling through the early universe caused slight fluctuations in pressure in the gaseous environment, which in turn left subtle temperature fluctuations reflected in the cosmic microwave background.
Using temperature changes, University of Washington physicist John Cramer was able to reconstruct those eerie sounds from space - the music of an expanding universe. He multiplied the frequency by 10 26 times so that human ears could hear him.
So no one will actually hear the scream in space, but there will be sound waves moving through clouds of interstellar gas or in the rarefied rays of the Earth's outer atmosphere.
The first thought about the cosmic music of space is very simple: there is no music there at all and there cannot be. Silence. Sounds are propagating vibrations of particles of air, liquid or solids, and in space, for the most part, there is only vacuum, emptiness. There is nothing to hesitate, nothing to sound, nowhere for music to come from: “In space, no one will hear your cry.” It seems that astrophysics and sounds are completely different stories.
Wanda Diaz-Merced, an astrophysicist at the South African Astronomical Observatory who studies gamma-ray bursts, is unlikely to agree. At the age of 20, she lost her sight and her only chance to stay in her favorite science was to learn to listen to space, which Diaz-Merced did well. Together with her colleagues, she made a program that translated various experimental data from her field (for example, light curves - the dependence of the intensity of radiation of a cosmic body on time) into small compositions, a kind of sound analogues of the usual visual graphs. For example, for light curves, the intensity was translated into a sound frequency that changed over time - Wanda took digital data and compared sounds with them.
Of course, for outsiders, these sounds, similar to the distant ringing of bells, sound somewhat strange, but Wanda has learned to “read” the information encrypted in them so well that she continues to study astrophysics well and often even discovers patterns that elude her sighted colleagues. It seems that cosmic music can tell a lot of interesting things about our Universe.
Mars rovers and other equipment: The mechanical tread of humanity
The technique that Diaz-Merced uses is called sonification - translating data arrays into audio signals, but in space there are many very real sounds, not synthesized by algorithms. Some of them are associated with man-made objects: the same rovers crawl along the surface of the planet not in a complete vacuum, and therefore inevitably produce sounds.
You can hear what comes out of this on Earth. Thus, German musician Peter Kirn spent several days in the laboratories of the European Space Agency and recorded a small collection of sounds from various tests there. But only when listening to them, you always need to mentally make a small correction: it is colder on Mars than on Earth, and the atmospheric pressure is much lower, and therefore all sounds there sound much lower than their terrestrial counterparts.
Another way to hear the sounds of our machines conquering space is a little more complicated: you can install sensors that record acoustic vibrations propagating not through the air, but directly in the bodies of the vehicles. This is how scientists reconstructed the sound with which the Philae spacecraft descended to the surface in 2014 - a short, electronic “bang”, as if it came out of the games for the Dandy console.
Ambient ISS: technology under control
Washing machine, car, train, plane - an experienced engineer can often tell if something is wrong by the sounds it makes, and there are more and more companies turning acoustic diagnostics into an important and powerful tool. Sounds of cosmic origin are also used for similar purposes. For example, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne says that on the ISS they often make audio recordings of operating equipment, which are sent to Earth to monitor the operation of the station.
Black hole: the deepest sound on Earth
Human hearing is limited: we perceive sounds with frequencies from 16 to 20,000 Hz, and all other acoustic signals are inaccessible to us. There are many acoustic signals in space beyond our capabilities. One of the most famous of them is produced by a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster - an incredibly low sound that corresponds to acoustic vibrations with a period of ten million years (for comparison, a person can detect acoustic waves with a period of a maximum of five hundredths of a second).
True, this sound itself, born from the collision of high-energy jets of a black hole and gas particles around it, did not reach us - it was strangled by the vacuum of the interstellar medium. So scientists reconstructed this distant melody from indirect evidence when the orbiting Chandra X-ray telescope observed giant concentric circles in the gas cloud around Perseus - areas of high and low gas concentrations created by incredibly powerful acoustic waves from the black hole.
Gravitational waves: sounds of a different nature
Sometimes massive astronomical objects emit a special kind of waves around them: the space around them either compresses or decompresses, and these vibrations travel through the entire Universe at the speed of light. On September 14, 2015, one such wave arrived on Earth: kilometers-long structures of gravitational wave detectors stretched and compressed into vanishing fractions of microns as gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes billions of light years from Earth passed through them. Just a few hundred million dollars (the cost of gravitational telescopes that caught the waves is estimated at about $400 million), and we touched upon universal history.
Cosmologist Janna Levin believes that if we were (unlucky enough) to be closer to this event, then it would be much easier to detect gravitational waves: they would simply cause vibrations in the eardrums, perceived by our consciousness as sound. Levin's group even simulated these sounds - the melody of two black holes merging in an unimaginable distance. Just don't confuse it with the other famous sounds of gravitational waves - short, electronic bursts that stop mid-sentence. This is only sonification, that is, acoustic waves with the same frequencies and amplitudes as the gravitational signals recorded by the detectors.
At a press conference in Washington, scientists even included an alarming sound that came from this collision from an unimaginably far distance, but it was just a beautiful emulation of what would have happened if the researchers had registered not a gravitational wave, but exactly the same in all parameters (frequency, amplitude, form) sound wave.
Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko: giant synthesizer
We don't notice how astrophysicists feed our imagination with enhanced visual images. Colored pictures from different telescopes, impressive animation, models and fantasies. In reality, everything in space is more modest: darker, dimmer and without a voice-over, but for some reason visual interpretations of experimental data are much less confusing than similar actions with sounds.
Perhaps things will change soon. Already now, sonification often helps scientists see (or rather, “hear” - these are the prejudices enshrined in language) new unknown patterns in their results. Thus, the researchers were surprised by the song of the comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko - oscillations of the magnetic field with characteristic frequencies from 40 to 50 MHz, translated into sounds, because of which the comet is even compared to a kind of giant synthesizer, weaving its melody not from an alternating electric current, but from variables magnetic fields.
The fact is that the nature of this music is still unclear, since the comet itself does not have its own magnetic field. Perhaps these fluctuations in magnetic fields are the result of the interaction of the solar wind and particles flying from the surface of the comet into outer space, but this hypothesis has not been fully confirmed.
Pulsars: the beat of extraterrestrial civilizations
Cosmic music is tightly intertwined with mysticism. Mysterious sounds on the Moon, noticed by the astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission (most likely, it was radio interference), the songs of the planets “spreading through the mind in waves of calm,” the harmony of the spheres, in the end - it’s not easy to resist fantasies when exploring the vast expanses space. A similar story happened with the discovery of radio pulsars - universal metronomes, systematically emitting powerful radio pulses.
These objects were first noticed back in 1967, and then scientists mistook them for giant radio transmitters of an extraterrestrial civilization, but now we are almost sure that these are compact neutron stars, beating their radio rhythm for millions of years. Tam-tam-tam - these impulses can be translated into sounds, just as a radio turns radio waves into music to get a cosmic beat.
Interstellar space and the ionosphere of Jupiter: songs of wind and plasma
Many more sounds are generated by the solar wind - streams of charged particles from our star. Because of it, the ionosphere of Jupiter sings (these are sonified fluctuations in the density of the plasma that makes up the ionosphere), the rings of Saturn and even interstellar space.
In September 2012, the space probe "" just left the solar system and transmitted a bizarre signal to earth. Streams of solar wind interacted with the plasma of interstellar space, which generated characteristic oscillations of electric fields that could be sonified. A monotonous rough noise turning into a metallic whistle.
We may never leave our solar system, but now we have something other than colorized astrophotos. Whimsical melodies telling about the world beyond our blue planet.
