If you close your eyes, you still have senses that have an idea of what's around you. Touch is one of them, because touching or feeling objects is a natural way to recognize them. But if there's one thing that provides a lot of information about the environment, it's the ear. Thanks to sound we can send messages by voice, but there is something unknown when we look into space. Is there sound in space or not?
The propagation of sound waves over such a large area may seem obvious to humans. However, science and the experience of astronauts are very different, as we are going to tell you below.
First thing: how sound travels
To many, sound is any vibration that travels through the air and is picked up by the ears. This definition may seem a bit vague, but this is how it generally works. There's nothing more to see than how a speaker vibrates, and you can finally hear the song, program or podcast you're singing.
But we are talking about a scientific explanation in which an element creates waves that excite the air around it, causing pressure changes in it. From here we can Limits certain limits, such as ultrasound, which cannot be picked up by the human ear.
To this, we must add other physical phenomena such as absorption, reflection (called echo) or scattering of sound by a material.
The presence of particles, the main point
Now that we understand what sound is and how it works, let's get to the important part of why there is no sound in space. To do this, we're going to have our feet back on Earth, where there are various ways to ensure that sound travels efficiently and directly.
And sound, or rather vibrations, propagate thanks only to a material medium to travel through. In scientific terms, movement requires continuous particles. These are found in a medium such as air, which is the most common, or even water, which is a good diffusion medium.
What happens in space? Well, quite the opposite. There is no sound in space because there are no particles through which vibrations can propagate. No matter how strong the vibration produced by a rocket engine is, it has no effect in a vacuum because there are no particles to transmit the sound.
But what about spaceships?
This is a very important question because there is no sound because there is no means of propagation in space. However, it can be in astronauts' suits and inside spacecraft The International Space Station is broadcasting the sound.
Astronauts and scientists in these space modules have the opportunity to communicate constantly because of the air inside these structures and suits that allow waves to travel freely and transmit vibrations.
NASA explains how galaxies sound
Yes, you can do it even if you don't believe it. NASA is a very advanced company when it comes to technology, and while it's clear that there is no sound in space, that doesn't stop it from making its own interpretations of what's beyond the limits. That's what you called it SonificationsHe has used different photographs taken from space to give them a possible sound.
Thanks to a system for processing images obtained from probes sent into space, it was possible to convert the image into sound, and you have the above result to know how they sound.
