Scientist: There is sound in space
Publication date: Saturday, January 20, 2024
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The popular science we have learned since childhood is not wrong. There is no sound in space. Because sound is transmitted by the vibration of atoms and molecules, but! There are many places in space where matter (such as dust, plasma, etc.) can also become a medium for transmitting sound in silent space. Therefore, “sound in space” is still a topic of great interest to scientists, no matter where we are. The sound of a planet talking, the sound of an alien waterfall or even the roar of a black hole.
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According to a report in Astronomy on the 18th, space is a vacuum environment, and sound is transmitted by material vibrations. In space, there are no atoms or molecules to carry sound waves, so there is no sound. But even if space is vacuum enough that ordinary sounds cannot propagate through it, it is not actually a perfect vacuum. There are indeed some particles floating in it. For example, at a certain distance outside the Earth’s atmosphere, there are 5 hydrogen atoms per milliliter of space. . Scientists are still curious about what human voices would sound like on the neighboring planets Venus and Mars. Through hypothetical experiments, Mars is usually below the freezing point, with a thin atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide. Venus is even worse. Its atmosphere is hot enough to melt lead, and it also has a thick layer of carbon dioxide. On Mars, your voice would sound high-pitched and hollow, a bit like the chipmunk speech in a Disney cartoon. On Venus, the pitch of your speech will be very deep, like the sound of a bass guitar.
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The reason is the thickness of the atmosphere. On Mars, thin air produces high sounds, while on Venus, thick air produces low sounds. Scientists also simulated other sounds, such as the sound of waterfalls on Titan. The space near stars in space is kept very hot due to strong radiation. The material there is very thin and in a plasma state. Plasma is a gas in which electrons and protons are separated, and the physical phenomenon of sound waves propagating in plasma is quite similar. Complex, sound waves travel faster in this low-density medium, and their wavelengths are longer. In 2022, NASA released a spectacular example of sound in space. It used X-ray data to create a sound representing the way a black hole stirs plasma in the Perseus galaxy cluster, 250 million light-years from Earth. The black hole itself makes no sound, but the diffusing plasma around it carries very long-wavelength sound waves.
