Can You Hear Sound in Space?

If space is a vacuum, is it possible to hear sound in it? Trace is here to discuss why sound travels differently in space.

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How Voyager 1 recorded noises when there’s no sound in interstellar space
“Beyond the border of interstellar space, the distant Voyager 1 spacecraft called back to Earth earlier this year with noises from its new environment.”

Can you hear sound in space?
“I'm afraid that your friends are right. In empty space, there is no air, and what we call ‘sound’ is actually vibrations in the air.”

Chris Hadfield shares the everyday sounds of space on SoundCloud

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[stiimuli]

Its a good thing there's no sound in space. We're near to a giant ball of trillions of nuclear explosions every second. Can you imagine how loud that would be even at this distance?

[bmerio]

Uh, Trace. You are in space; you're just on this spaceship called Earth.

[Hazzaws]

Darude Sandstorm can be heard in space. The beats from that song are so intense that it surpasses physics

[ZachBlackforest]

Radio waves that can be translated into sound! boom!

[kimmielizabeth]

Imagine being stuck on the outside of a space station and screaming and knocking on the door to let you in but they cant hear anything lol

[joyhally]

Farts you can hear them in space if you're the guy who did it, because it vibrates really close to your bones.

[mystuff]

It's lasers. You can detect the surface-vibrations of something and translate that to sound.

[sheriff]

There are ways for people to translate the tiny vibrations of thing that are caused by sound, into sound, using a camera. I believe MIT produced several experiments where they used a super high speed, high resolution camera to detect them. To the human eye, they're imperceptible, but to the camera, it was able to pick them up. I remember two experiments in particular where they observed  the sound via a chip bag, and a plant leaf, and in one of them they played the sound of a child singing, and detected it with remarkable quality. Or you could use a special laser and a solar panel to send the "sound" wave via the light. HouseholdHacker made a project that did this for very cheap. It wasn't very good, obviously, as it was made with materials he may have found around his house, but the proof of concept was there, and it actually worked.

[RawrFishAE]

There are electromagnetic waves in space that pulsate in a similar fashion to the sound waves that we can hear. In fact, any sort of change in energy - be it caused by plasma vibrations, radio waves, the interaction of charged particles, etc. - can be "translated" into audio that our brains can understand. NASA recently released some of these "translated" audio files, and it's worth hearing.

[derekonlinenow]

By using video cameras with high frame rate, and then using a specialized software to convert those into sound waves, just like the MIT researchers did.

[CHOM-fmio]

"if you're not in space you should be able to hear me just fine"
*deaf people in space 😶

[acryb]

This is all interesting but i always wondered how does an explosion happen in space or fire like what they do in movies because fire needs oxygen right

[marosvdb]

In 2009 I did a year 10 individual science project on sounds in vacuum, and extrapolated the results to space as well! And Star Wars explosions in space was also mentioned haha

[reuben]

Video summed up in one word.

*Yes.*

[BTA]

radio waves can go through outer space, because its not a sound frequency from vibrations but an electrical frequency... and electricity can form and travel in outer space.

[unpopuIaropinion]

Imagine this : What if there was an amazingly huge atmosphere (or something anyway so that sound can travel) around the sun, would you be able to listen on the explosions on the sun ?

[urastupid]

I can think of hundreds of ways. One would be a code in another form of waves translated to sound wave definition. Another would be moving the sound vibrations through a medium such as dust. There are endless possibilities. Note: it is possible to make heat into sound with enough of it altering the rate of collisions between molecules to speed up thus creating sound.

[Johntub]

The answer must be laser microphone. It is not a microphone per se. It is using laser beam to optically measure vibration  of the object the laser is pointed at and transfer them into sound. As an optical sensor, it can operate perfectly well in space.
But you would need a good reflective spot.

[symbolxchannel]

Sound can travel trough *electromagnetic waves* (radio for example)… This is how they communicate with each other. Their suit is equipped with an emitter-transmitter.

[schwartzhoffsteven]

Everyone knows that Star Wars was a long long time ago when the universe had not expanded and space was still dense enough to hear explosions in space. Quit whining :-)