Is there sound in Space? Yes.
joeyculoper27 asked me a question recently regarding sounds in space. Is it possible? If so, how?
To understand how and why, first you need to know what sound is: it’s a vibration (in the form of a “longitudinal wave”) through a medium of particles. Our ears can pick up certain frequencies of waves/vibrations in the air:
The vibrations of particles, if within the range of wave-frequency of 20 Hz to 20kHz, will be detected by our ears. This movement in the air is then reported to and interpreted by our brains as the thing we call “noise”.
In space, there’s no atmosphere. There’s nothing to propagate, for the most part, an acoustic sound. Space is a vacuum.
Except that that’s not, in the most extreme sense, true. There are exceptions.
If a wavelength of sound is so long (aka if the sound is so “deep”) that it could stretch from one particle of hydrogen floating through space to another, it could in theory travel as an actual acoustic noise through space.
There is such a thing traveling through space: a supermassive black hole in the Perseus Cluster is emitting a belch, a million billion times lower than what we could detect with our ears. It’s the deepest sound ever found. Here it is.
In general and for the vast majority of circumstances, sound doesn’t propagate through space. Certainly nothing anywhere near the range of human hearing.
There’s also noises of other forms in the universe. If you had radio antennas for ears, you’d find that the universe is one collective racket. NASA collected some of the radio songs being broadcasted by different places in the solar system such as Neptune, Saturn, Saturn’s rings, Jupiter etc. Here it is, enjoy.
