Our world is full of floating lamb, yarn and black holes. But if our eyes are closed and listened, what will these heavenly things look like? Do we hear a faded Awoud? Or a low accusation?
In fact, if you go to outer space, you may not hear much at all. “There is this common saying” No one can hear you screaming in space “for some reason,” Kimberly ArkoldI told the world of the NASA’s Evangelist Chendra Observatory, the Live Sciences. “The nature of the space is somewhat silent.”
At least, the space looks silent because of the way people understand and treat sound. “The sound is a pressure wave,” Chris ImpI told the Astronomy Professor at the University of Arizona, direct sciences. This means that when the sound passes through the air, it is actually the energy spreads across an intermediary, as the gas molecules move and touched each other. These vibrations are discovered by our ear, then translated by our brains into a sound.
“If you do not have a gas, if you don’t have a way, you will not have any sound because there is nothing there,” I explain me. “Things do not bounce back to each other, and there is no way to carry energy.”
The space is largely vacuumThis means that it contains very few molecules. For example, at the distance between galaxies, there are on average on average Less than one atom per cubic meterImpey pointed out that making air in space a billion times less intense than the air we breathe. This means that even if there is noise in other galaxies outside milky wayWe will not hear them because the sound cannot travel through the vacuum to reach our galaxy.
But this does not mean that the space is completely free of noise. There are places, such as the atmosphere of other planets or near The horizons of the event from black holesWhere there are sufficient molecules to transfer vibrations. Because the densities of these media are completely different from the Earth’s atmosphere, however, these sounds cannot be discovered Human ear.
For example, researchers found that super black holes in the Perseus Cluster group rooted. This creates pressure waves – such as sound waves, explained Arcand. By taking pictures of the gas molecules that extend to the space, the researchers calculated the amount of pressure transferred in this obscene to find out their shape.
Their analysis was published in 2003 in Monthly notifications of the Royal Astronomical SocietyPut the tone in a low apartment b. “It is like 57 octaves below the middle C,” said Arcand. “So it is really low, many octaves are less than people can hope to hear.”
Astronomers also recorded the voices MarsSince some Mars Rover is equipped with audio detection devices. These tools can capture the wind sound on the red planet. But because the atmosphere of Mars is very thin, the sound frequency is very low and out of our hearing scope.
Dismantling space
Some scientists have recently started translating some of these dim sounds into irritation that we can hear. This practice is called, where researchers imagine what the space can look by by converting these data, Sonification. Arkang said that many scientists working in Sonification have a background in music, and they use their knowledge to re -imagine astronomical data in something that people can test, while maintaining the context of data as well.
“By working on the Peresyus Group, we were really trying to remain faithful to the knowledge of that apartment, and this idea about this superconduct black hole that wanders around all this hot gas.” As a result, she and her colleagues ended with a luxurious black hole that appears as if A roar entity and creeping.
Arkolid said that Sonification Nasa has brought a completely new audience for space science, because space often seems far away and abstract, while Sound links people to space because it is linked to emotions and memory.
This was especially useful for people who suffer from blind or visually weak, who are now learning new things about space through Sonified data, according to a study conducted in 2024 published in the magazine Communication limits.
However, there are still many sounds that can be found in space. Note that Venus It has a very thick atmosphere, so its winds may look completely different from those on Earth or Mars – although landing on a tool on the burning planet will be very difficult. NASA also constantly launches more son, Re -imagine X -ray collections From distant galaxies such as gel, grumbling and fixed organic pollutants (which you can listen here))
“There is a quiet symphony that occurs in the universe,” said Arkardid. “Why don’t you try to decipher it so that we can translate it and listen to it ourselves?”