The cosmos is not a homogeneous nothing. Between various objects there are clouds of gas and dust. They are the remnants of supernova explosions and the site for star formation. In some areas, this interstellar gas is dense enough to propagate sound waves, but they are not susceptible 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 spreads through the air like a wave. When it reaches the ear, the person perceives it as sound.

When a sound wave travels through air, its pressure fluctuates up and down, as if sea water into 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 propagate in a medium in which the wavelength is not greater than the average distance between the particles. Physicists call this "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 short wavelength sounds and vice versa.

Long wave sounds have frequencies that the ear perceives as low tones. In a gas with a mean free path greater than 17 m (20 Hz), sound waves will be too low frequency to be perceived by humans. They are called infrasounds. If there were aliens with ears that perceive very low notes, they would know for sure whether sounds are heard in open space.

Song of the Black Hole

Some 220 million light-years away, at the center of a cluster of thousands of galaxies, hums the lowest note the universe has ever heard. 57 octaves below middle C, which is about a million billion times deeper than the sound of the frequency that a person can hear.

The deepest sound that humans can hear has a cycle of about one vibration every 1/20th of a second. A black hole in the constellation Perseus has a cycle of about one oscillation every 10 million years.

This came to light in 2003, when NASA's Chandra Space Telescope detected something in the gas filling the Perseus Cluster: concentrated rings of light and dark, like ripples in a pond. Astrophysicists say that 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 that can be seen

Hot, magnetized gas swirls around the black hole, much like 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 way, and this impact causes eerie sounds from space.

They travel through the Perseus Cluster hundreds of thousands of light-years from their source, but sound can only travel as long as there is enough gas to carry it. Therefore, he stops at the edge of the gas cloud that fills 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 at a soundproof chamber.

strange planet

Our planet lets out a deep groan every time its crust moves. Then there is no doubt whether sounds propagate in space. An earthquake can create vibrations in the atmosphere with a frequency of one to five Hz. If 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 just gradually becomes thinner until it eventually disappears altogether. From 80 to 550 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the mean free path of a molecule is about a kilometer. This means that the air at this altitude is about 59 times thinner than it would be possible to hear sound. It can only carry long infrasonic waves.

When a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the northeast coast of Japan in March 2011, seismographs around the world recorded its waves passing through the Earth, and the vibrations caused low-frequency oscillations in the atmosphere. These vibrations have traveled all the way to where the ship (Gravity Field) and the stationary satellite Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) compares Earth's gravity in low orbit with a mark of 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. 2011, GOCE accelerometers detected vertical displacement in the very thin atmosphere around the satellite, as well as undulating shifts in air pressure as sound waves from an earthquake propagate. The satellite's thrusters corrected for the offset and stored the data, which became something like an infrasound recording of an earthquake.

This entry was classified in the satellite data until a team 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 if there is sound in space. At that 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. After that, everything finally cooled down enough to condense into atoms. Before the cooling took place, 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 microwave background glow, visible only to very sensitive radio telescopes. Physicists call this relic radiation. This is the most old light in the Universe. It answers the question of whether there is sound in space. The cosmic microwave background contains a record of the oldest music in the universe.

Light to help

How does light help you know if there is sound in space? Sound waves travel through air (or interstellar gas) as pressure fluctuations. When the gas is compressed, it gets hotter. On a cosmic scale, this phenomenon is so intense that stars form. And when the gas expands, it cools down. Sound waves propagating through the early universe caused slight pressure fluctuations 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 has been able to reconstruct these eerie sounds from space - the music of the expanding universe. He multiplied the frequency by a factor of 1026 so that human ears could hear it.

So no one will really 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 the cosmos is very simple: yes, there is no music at all there and cannot be. Silence. Sounds are propagating vibrations of particles of air, liquid or solid bodies, and in space for the most part there is only vacuum, emptiness. There is nothing to waver, there is nothing to sound, there is nowhere for music to come from: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It seems that astrophysics and sounds are completely different stories.

It is unlikely that Wanda Diaz-Merced, an astrophysicist at the South African Astronomical Observatory who studies gamma-ray bursts, would agree with this. At the age of 20, she lost her sight and she had the only chance to stay in her beloved science - to learn to listen to space, which Diaz-Merced did an excellent job of. Together with colleagues, she made a program that translated various experimental data from her field (for example, light curves - the dependence of the radiation intensity of a cosmic body on time) into small compositions, a kind of sound analogues of the usual visual charts. For example, for light curves, the intensity was translated into a sound frequency that changed over time - Wanda took digital data and compared sounds to them.

Of course, for outsiders, these sounds, similar to the distant chimes of bells, sound somewhat strange, but Wanda has learned to “read” the information encrypted in them so well that she continues to do astrophysics perfectly and often even discovers patterns that elude her sighted colleagues. It seems that space music can tell a lot of interesting things about our Universe.

Mars rovers and other technology: Mechanical tread of mankind

The technique that Diaz-Merced uses is called sonification - the transposition of data arrays into audio signals, but there are many quite real sounds in space, and not sounds synthesized by algorithms. Some of them are associated with man-made objects: the same rovers crawl on the surface of the planet not in a complete vacuum, and therefore inevitably produce sounds.

You can also hear what comes out of this on Earth. Thus, the German musician Peter Kirn spent several days in the laboratories of the European Space Agency and recorded there a small collection of sounds from various tests. But only while listening to them, you always need to mentally make a small correction: it is colder on Mars than on Earth, and atmospheric pressure is much lower, and therefore all sounds there sound much lower than their earthly counterparts.

Another way to hear the sounds of our machines conquering space is a little more complicated: you can install sensors that detect acoustic vibrations that do not propagate through the air, but directly in the technicians' bodies. So scientists have restored the sound with which the Philae spacecraft descended to the surface in 2014 - a short, electronic “bam”, as if it came out of games for the Dandy console.

Ambient ISS: technique under control

A washing machine, a car, a train, an airplane - an experienced engineer can often identify a problem with the sounds it makes, and there are more and more companies turning acoustic diagnostics into an important and powerful instrument. For similar purposes, sounds of cosmic origin are also used. For example, the Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne (Frank De Winne) says that the ISS often makes audio recordings of working equipment, which are sent to Earth to monitor the operation of the station.

Black hole: the lowest 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 among them is emitted by a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster - this is an incredibly low sound that corresponds to acoustic oscillations with a period of ten million years (for comparison: a person is able to pick up acoustic waves with a maximum period 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. Therefore, scientists reconstructed this distant melody from indirect data when the Chandra orbiting X-ray telescope examined giant concentric circles in the gas cloud around Perseus - areas of increased and decreased gas concentration, created by incredibly powerful acoustic waves from a black hole.

Gravitational waves: sounds of a different nature

Sometimes massive astronomical objects launch a special kind of waves around them: the space around them either contracts or expands, and these vibrations run through the entire Universe at the speed of light. On September 14, 2015, the arrival of one of these waves on Earth: multi-kilometer structures of gravitational wave detectors were stretched and compressed by vanishing fractions of microns when 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 have touched the history of the universe.

Cosmologist Janna Levin believes that if we were (not lucky enough) to be closer to this event, then it would be much easier to fix gravitational waves: they would simply cause vibrations of 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 do not confuse it with other famous sounds of gravitational waves - short electronic bursts that break off in 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 turned on the disturbing sound that came from this collision from an unimaginable 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: a giant synthesizer

We don't notice how astrophysicists feed our imaginations with enhanced visual images. Colorized pictures from different telescopes, impressive animation, models and fantasies. In reality, everything in space is more modest: darker, duller and without voiceover, but for some reason visual interpretations of experimental data are much less confusing than similar actions with sounds.

Perhaps things will change soon. Even now, sonification often helps scientists to see (or rather, "hear" - these are the prejudices enshrined in the language) in their results new unknown patterns. So, the researchers were surprised by the song of the comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko - fluctuations magnetic field with characteristic frequencies from 40 to 50 MHz, transcribed into sounds, because of which the comet is even compared with a kind of giant synthesizer, weaving its melody not from an alternating electric current, but from variable 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 away from the surface of the comet into outer space, but this hypothesis has not been fully confirmed.

Pulsars: a bit of extraterrestrial civilizations

Space music is tightly intertwined with mysticism. Mysterious sounds on the Moon, noticed by the astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission (most likely, they were radio interference), “sweeping waves of calmness” of the planets’ songs, the harmony of the spheres, in the end, it’s not easy to keep from fantasies when you study the vast expanses space. Such a story was with the discovery of radio pulsars - universal metronomes, emitting powerful radio pulses with methodical constancy.

For the first time, these objects were noticed back in 1967, and then scientists mistook them for giant radio transmitters. 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 turned into sounds, just like a radio turns radio waves into music to get a cosmic beat.

Interstellar space and Jupiter's ionosphere: songs of wind and plasma

Many more sounds are produced 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 space probe" " just left the solar system and transmitted a bizarre signal to earth. The solar wind streams interacted with the plasma of interstellar space, which generated characteristic oscillations of electric fields that could be sonified. Monotonous rough noise, turning into a metallic whistle.

We may never leave our solar system, but now we have something else besides colorized astroimages. Whimsical melodies that tell about the world beyond our blue planet.

And what do we hear in space anyway? Could it be that a man in space would not have heard 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 you know, radio waves can travel in space.

Once your radio receives a signal, it converts it into sound that will move smoothly through the air in your suit. You are flying in space in a spacesuit and accidentally hit your helmet on a space telescope.

You can write and post an article on the portal.

Because in this case there is no need for air, for another 15 seconds you will hear the conversations of your colleagues in the shuttle. Perhaps you will hear a minimal sound coming through your own body. However, you will not be able to create it, since it also needs air.

09.08.2008 21:37of course.it's all Hollywood directors compromising people's brains with scenes and shots in space.it's impossible to feel speed or sound or anything else in space!!

Humans - none Sound is periodic pressure fluctuations that propagate in any medium, for example, in a gas. For us to hear a 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, special effects are simply breathtaking. A person sits in an ordinary chair and truly enjoys watching a new action game, a new science fiction.

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 that we see and hear strikes our imagination, and we ourselves become the main characters of this film. However, in most films, such as " star Wars and Star Trek, the sound effects for many of the outer space combat scenes abound.

In addition, space flight is a difficult test for the person himself, because some people in space get 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 00:40 Did you study at school at all? There is a technical and physical vacuum

In a vacuum, they can only fly in a straight line if they don't have rudder motors. 03/22/2010 22:05 Nya, no, if you look at the universe not as a dark, black ball in which float: galaxies, planets, asteroids, etc. You have a vacuum in your head. If you are interested in what is really happening in space, see documentaries rather than fantastic. 05/14/2012 10:23 people and someone knows what happened before big bang!they say that at that time our universe fit into a small dot the size of a pinhead!

Plus, there is an interesting “Casimir effect”, which seems to be proven, which means that a wave effect is possible even in a vacuum, which, as it were, hints ... 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.

All this indicates that, no matter how Hollywood filmmakers try to explain the audible sounds in space, all the same, as proved above, a person does not hear anything in space.

Are there any sounds in space? Is there a "voice", "music" of the cosmos?

No, there are no sounds. Sound propagates due to the collision of air molecules, which then hit the eardrums, and there is no air in a vacuum, so sound cannot propagate, which means there is no music or sounds there.

There is no air under water, but sounds are heard. Surf and other vibrate air, matter, and sound is produced. If you exhale in the vacuum of space, then where the air ends there is something. Sound is a wave, right? And all sorts of radio waves propagate in space, and so on. Comet boulders float. Hanging asteroid belts, planets. They hang in nothing. In nowhere. If you throw a stone a little bit and it will fly, fly and nothing can stop it, and as a result, it will be attracted to some planet attracted by gravity. And imagine not a stone but a hammer lying on Mars, an astronaut's hammer! It’s a pity that there are no sounds in space, you won’t even be able to talk. And there is no air temperature. In Sochi there is, but not in space. There is a vacuum there. The endless vacuum of space. And not so far away from it, several people live in a vacuum. At the space station. Around them is the fragile frame of the station and some air so they can talk to each other. For the soul. But there is no air on Mars. And there is no one to talk to. Therefore, there is no life and no soul.

No sound is heard in space. There is silence. This is because sound waves do not propagate in space (in a vacuum). But, on the other hand, there are a lot of different radio waves in space that can be converted into sound, though it will be heard as interference, but still. In the form of radio waves, you can even hear the echo of the big bang. This is probably the same music space.

There are no ordinary sound waves in space. because they need air to propagate, that is, some kind of medium capable of transmitting a sound wave. Therefore, a person in space with his ears will not hear anything. However, this does not mean that the cosmos is completely silent, because the voices of the planets and stars are recorded. It's just that space is filled to the very top with various radiations, and among them there are so-called extra-long radio waves, that is, electromagnetic radiation. sound spectrum. A person will not hear such radiation anyway, but it can be caught and recorded, which is what radio astronomers sometimes do.

There is very little gas in space. It is distributed unevenly and, t.s., is very discharged. There so-called. vacuum. Sound in a vacuum and in vacuum space will not be transferred. Therefore, there is nothing to hear if you shout, for example.

The most grandiose cosmic catastrophes, for example, the explosion of a star, pass completely silently, in perfect silence. We can experience the pleasure of hearing sound only on Earth, where there is an atmosphere. And in order for us to hear the sounds, in addition to the atmosphere, there is a lot more that is necessary. Indeed, our earthly world, living beings, including us, people, are wonderfully arranged!

In modern cinemas, special effects are simply breathtaking. A person sits in an ordinary chair and truly enjoys watching a new action game, a new science fiction. Every now and then various images and characters of a violent space battle appear on the screen. Strange sounds echo throughout the cinema hall, then the noise of the engine spaceship, then rattle. 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 that we see and hear strikes our imagination, and we ourselves become the main characters of this film. But if we happened to be personally present at such a battle, would we be able to hear anything at all?

If you try to answer this question only in terms of science fiction films, the results are contradictory. For example, the key phrase in the advertisement of the movie "Aliens" was such a replica "In space, no one can hear you scream." The short television series Firefly did not use any sound effects at all for the space battle scenes. However, in most movies such as Star Wars and Star Trek, the sound effects for many of the outer space combat scenes abound. Which of these fictional universes can you trust? Could it be that a man in space would not have heard a spaceship rush past him? And what do we hear in space anyway?

Initially, to conduct such an experiment, researchers from HowStuffWorks planned to send one of their specialists into orbit to observe firsthand whether sound can really travel in space. Unfortunately, this turned out to be too costly a project. In addition, space flight is a difficult test for the person himself, because some people in space get something like seasickness. Therefore, all the following hypotheses are based solely on previously obtained scientific observations. However, before diving deeper into this matter, there are two important factors to consider: how sound travels, and what happens to it in space. After analyzing this information, we will be able to answer the question we posed: can people hear sounds in space?

Space weather

Did you know that space also has its own weather? There are special scientists who make weather forecasts in space. Next, we will talk about how sound moves and why a person perceives it.

Sound moves in mechanical (or elastic) waves. Mechanical wave - mechanical disturbances propagating in an elastic medium. As far as sound is concerned, such a disturbance is a vibrating object. In this case, any sequence of connected and interactive particles can act as a medium. This means that sound can travel through gases, liquids and solids.

Let's look at this with an example. Imagine a church bell. When the bell rings, it vibrates, which means that the ringing itself squirms through the air very quickly. As the bell moves to the right, it repels air particles. These air particles in turn push other adjacent air particles, and this process occurs in a chain. At this time, another action takes place on the other side of the bell - the bell pulls adjacent air particles along with it, and they, in turn, attract other air particles. This pattern of sound movement is called a sound wave. The vibrating bell is the perturbation, and the air particles are the medium.

Sound travels unhindered through the air. Try resting your ear against any hard surface, such as a table, and close your eyes. Have another person tap the surface with their finger at this time. The knock in this case will be the initial perturbation. With each knock on the table, vibrations will pass through it. The particles in the table will collide with each other and form a medium for the sound. Particles in the table collide with air particles that are between the table and your eardrum. The movement of a wave from one medium to another, as it does in this case, is called transmission.

Sound speed

The speed of a sound wave depends on the medium through which it travels. In general, sound travels fastest in solids than in a liquid or gas. Also, the denser the medium, the slower the movement of sound. In addition, the speed of sound varies with temperature - on a cold day, the speed of sound is faster than on a warm day.

The human ear perceives sound with a frequency of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. The pitch of the sound is determined by its frequency, the loudness is determined by the amplitude and frequency of sound vibrations (the loudest at a given amplitude is a sound with a frequency of 3.5 kHz). Sound waves with a frequency below 20 Hz are called infrasound, and those with a frequency above 20,000 Hz are called ultrasound. Air particles collide with the eardrum. As a result, wave vibrations begin in the ear. The brain interprets such vibrations as sounds. By itself, the process of perception of sounds by our ear is very complicated.

All this suggests that sound simply needs a physical medium through which it could move. But is there enough material in space to create such a medium for sound waves? This will be discussed further.

But before answering the above question, it is necessary to define what "space" is in our understanding. By space, we mean the space of the universe outside the Earth's atmosphere. You have probably heard that space is a vacuum. Vvacuum means that there are no substances in this place. But how can space be considered a vacuum? There are stars, planets, asteroids, moons and comets in space, to name but a few. space bodies. Isn't this material enough? How can space be considered a vacuum if it contains all these massive bodies?

The thing is, space is huge. Between these large objects are millions of miles of emptiness. In this empty space - also called interstellar space - there is virtually nothing, which is why space is considered a vacuum.

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 near 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 you know, radio waves can move in space. This suggests that if you find yourself in space and put on a spacesuit with a radio receiver, then your friend will be able to transmit a radio signal to you that, for example, on space station brought pizza and you really hear it. And you will hear it because radio waves are not mechanical, they are electromagnetic. Electromagnetic waves can transfer energy through a vacuum. Once your radio receives a signal, it converts it into sound that will move smoothly through the air in your suit.

Consider another case: you are flying in space in a spacesuit, and accidentally hit your helmet on a space telescope. According to the idea, a sound should be heard as a result of a collision, since in this case there is a medium for sound waves: a helmet and air in a 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 a 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 chains" of the cosmos suffocate you, you will be able to make out a few 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 in this case there is no need for air, for another 15 seconds you will hear the conversations of your colleagues in the shuttle. After that, you will probably pass out and start to suffocate.

All this indicates that, no matter how Hollywood filmmakers try to explain the audible sounds in space, all the same, as proved above, a person does not hear anything in space. Therefore, if you really want to watch real science fiction, we advise you to close your ears the next time you go to the cinema when some battles take place in vacuum space. Then the film will seem really realistic and you will have new topic to talk with friends.