Our universe is full of floating nebulae, textile planets and black holes. But how do these objects sound if we close our eyes and listen? Can you hear a faint wesh? Or low ham?
In fact, you probably don’t hear much when you go to space. Kimberly Arcand, visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, is popular saying, “You can’t hear you scream in space.” “The nature of the universe remains silent.”
At the very least, spaces appear silent because of the way humans understand and handle healthy methods. “Sound is a compressed wave,” Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told Live Science. This means that as sound moves through the air, the gas molecules actually propagate energy through the medium that moves and knocks each other. These vibrations are detected by our ears and our brains convert them into sounds.
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“If you don’t have gas, if you don’t have medium, don’t make a sound because there’s nothing there,” Impey explained. “Things don’t bounce back against each other and there’s no way to carry energy.”
Space is primarily vacuum, meaning there are few molecules. For example, in intergalactic spaces, on average, fewer than one atom per cubic meter, the air in space is billion times less denser than air breathing. This means that even if there is noise in other galaxies outside the Milky Way, you won’t hear them because the sound cannot pass through the vacuum and reach the galaxy.
But that doesn’t mean that the space is completely noiseless. There are places near other planetary atmospheres and black holes events with enough molecules to transmit vibrations. However, the density of these media is very different from the Earth’s atmosphere, so these sounds cannot be detected by the human ear.
For example, researchers have discovered that ultra-large black holes in Perseus clusters burn gas. This creates pressure waves, like sound waves, and Arcand explained. By taking images of gas molecules wavy in space, researchers calculated the amount of pressure transmitted to these belching to understand how they sound.
Their analysis, published in 2003 in a monthly notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, places the tone in a low B-flat. “It’s like 57 octaves below the center C,” Arcand said. “So it’s really low. There’s more octaves than humans would have hoped to hear.”
Some Mars rovers are equipped with acoustic detectors, so astronomers are also recording sounds on Mars. These instruments can capture the sounds of the wind on the red planet. However, the atmosphere on Mars is so thin that the sound is also very low and is outside the hearing range, Impey said.
Space ultrasonic treatment
Some scientists have recently begun to translate some of these faint sounds into rumbles that we can hear. This practice, in which researchers imagine how space sounds by transforming these data, is called sonifices. Many scientists with musical backgrounds have musical backgrounds, Arcand said they will use their knowledge to remain faithful to the data context while rethinking astronomical data to what people can experience.
“Working on the Perseus cluster, we were really trying to stay true to that B-flat science, and the idea that this very large black hole is vurned into all of this hot gas,” Arcand said. As a result, she and her colleagues have become ultra-high Massive black holes that sound like groans and belching.
Data beyond NASA’s data brought a whole new audience to space science, Arcand said. Spaces often seem distant and abstract, so Sound connects people to the universe because they are linked to emotions and memories.
This is especially useful for people with visual impairments. This is a 2024 survey published in Communications magazine, and is now learning new things about space through sound data.
Still, there are still many sounds in the universe. Impey said that because Venus has a very dense atmosphere, the winds can sound very different to Earth and Mars winds, but landing instruments on a burning planet is very difficult. NASA is also reconsidering the release of more sonication and rethinking the hum, complain and pop (you can hear it here) x-ray datasets from distant galaxies.
“There’s a quiet symphony happening in space,” Arkando said. “So why not try to decode it so you can translate it and listen to it yourself?”
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