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Scientist: There are sounds in space
Release date: Saturday January 20, 2024
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The popular science we have learned since childhood is not wrong: there is no sound in space. Because sound is transmitted through the vibration of atoms and molecules, but! There are many places in space where matter (e.g. dust, plasma, etc.) can become a medium for the transmission of sound even in silent space. Therefore, “sound in space” is still a topic of great interest to scientists, no matter where we are. The sound of a talking planet, the sound of an alien waterfall or even the roar of a black hole.
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According to a report in Astronomy on the 18th, space is a vacuum environment and sound is transmitted through material vibrations. In space there are no atoms or molecules that can transmit sound waves, so there is no sound. But even if space is so vacuum-rich that ordinary sounds can’t travel through it, it’s actually not a perfect vacuum. There are actually some particles floating in it. For example, at a certain distance outside the Earth’s atmosphere, there are 5 hydrogen atoms per milliliter of space. . Scientists are still curious about what human voices would sound like on neighboring planets Venus and Mars. According to hypothetical experiments, Mars is normally below freezing and has a thin atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide. Things are even worse with Venus. Its atmosphere is hot enough to melt lead and also has a thick layer of carbon dioxide. On Mars, your voice would sound high and hollow, a bit like the speech of a chipmunk in a Disney cartoon. On Venus, the pitch of your speech will be very low, like the sound of a bass guitar.
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The reason lies in the thickness of the atmosphere. On Mars, thin air produces high-pitched sounds, while on Venus, thick air produces deep sounds. Scientists also simulated other sounds, such as the sound of waterfalls on Titan. Space near stars in space is kept very hot by strong radiation. The material there is very thin and is in a plasma state. Plasma is a gas in which electrons and protons are separated, and the physical phenomenon is quite similar to the propagation of sound waves in plasma. Complex sound waves travel faster and their wavelengths are longer in this low-density medium. In 2022, NASA released a spectacular example of sound in space. X-ray data was used to create a sound that represents the way a black hole moves plasma in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years from Earth. The black hole itself does not produce sound, but the diffusing plasma around it carries very long-wavelength sound waves.
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