Using a very low frequency receiver at Halley’s research station, one can receive the radio waves produced by our planet, our planet. On Earth, scientists can convert waves into audible sound, just like radio waves are converted into sound.
Planets make noise. They make noise because they have weather phenomena, and their weather produces sound waves. These sounds travel throughout space, and scientists at certain laboratories can detect and reconstruct the sound. However, the movement of planets around the sun does not produce noise.
One of the first uses of radio here on Earth was to transmit sound, and in the same way that an audio signal can be transmitted over radio waves, so radio telescope data can be converted into audible sounds.
There are many such “sounds of space” picked up by instruments on various spacecraft, from the Juno spacecraft monitoring plasma wave signals emanating from Jupiter’s ionosphere to Cassini detecting Saturn’s radio emission (which far exceeds the range of human hearing). and moved down so that they can be heard).
What Sound Waves Are
Sound waves are the vibrations of air molecules, but these radiations—even though they belong to the frequency range of the human ear—are electromagnetic radiation (oscillating electric and magnetic fields) that cannot be heard directly. On Earth, sound reaches your ears primarily through vibrating air molecules, but in nearly empty regions of space, there are no (or very few) particles that can vibrate, so there is no sound.
Unlike light or heat, sound travels in waves, but unlike them, sound travels by causing molecules to vibrate. In order for you to hear sound, molecules must transmit these vibrations from their source to the small bones in your ears.
Sound transmission requires a medium, such as air, that contains molecules that can move and propel the waves forward. We can then convert these vacuum safety waves into sounds that humans can hear (this is how things like radio transmission work). Space is a vacuum, so space generally doesn’t carry sound waves like air on Earth (although there are some sounds in outer space, we just can’t hear them). Sound waves can’t travel in the near-perfect vacuum of space – no one can hear your screams, as the Alien slogan says.
Just because sound can’t travel in the vacuum of space doesn’t mean the planets and our sun don’t make noise. Back on our planet, the sounds of very loud earthquakes are sometimes loud enough to propagate through space, and infrasound can continue where normal sound should go. Sound is constantly present in most organisms on our planet, but in the rest of the solar system, sound is often completely absent. This video features NASA space sounds, giving you an idea of what different objects in our solar system would sound like in our solar system if you could hear them.
Some Sounds Have Been Recorded in Space
You can hear some of the sounds recorded in space on the ESA website, including the sun’s singing and Comet Tempel 1 passing through Saturn’s rings. The sounds recorded by Juno are helping scientists better understand the dynamic space environment in which we live to protect satellites and astronauts.
Vibrations moving through space can be used to create “fake” sounds (i.e. not real “sounds” that a planet or other object would make). If you think, for example, if you play an oboe or other wind instrument, with the oboe you blow on the reed at the end of the instrument, which makes the reed vibrate, creates pressure fluctuations in the air, and is just waves. voiced and the sound is enclosed in a musical instrument, in the body of the instrument.
The sound makes the instrument resonate and that is why we hear the beautiful clear tones of the musical instrument when someone plays it. When a sound is made, it is because something vibrates (like the vocal cord) and that something hits the air next to it in a certain way, which causes all other air particles to vibrate together in a certain way. – Presto! – you have sound. In the case of a star, sound is naturally created in the outermost layers of stars, such as the sun, by turbulence, and this sound is picked up and causes the star to resonate.
Cosmic Sound Waves Are Heavily Muffled
These sound waves are muffled when the medium ends (say, when the atmosphere on Earth gives way to the vacuum of space). In contrast, sound waves in cosmic plasma are actually much more like the normal sound of these P-waves: they too are simply pressure waves, with the only difference being that magnetic fields in plasma also exhibit the same pressure, which is why we call them magnetosonic waves.
According to NASA, the planetary sounds of Mars are slightly different from what you hear on Earth, they are quieter and more muffled due to the lower density and different composition of the Martian atmosphere. According to the BBC, the planetary sounds we hear are wave-like vibrations of air molecules that occur in the frequency range to which our ears are sensitive. The astronaut’s transmitter converts the form of the sound wave into the form of a radio wave and sends the radio waves through space to another astronaut, where they are converted back into sound so that another person can hear it.
We humans have even managed to hear the sound of distant black holes, mysterious cosmic objects from which nothing can escape, not even light. Not only are more black hole mergers discovered, but a bright future for gravitational wave astronomy, as new detectors will bring new types of sounds to our ears.
