This has been posted by a few friends on Facebook, and thought you fine people might be interested in it. We have have converted electromagnetic waves in space into audible sounds. http://www.thedailyepic.com/nasa-probes-record-sounds-in-space-and-its-terrifying/ Sounds like the theme music to a horror film.
How do you build a mike to pick up sounds you cannot hear? Or, do you pick up sounds and explain them away?
@KaTrian and I have used those recordings as background music while writing the creepier parts of our sci-fi piece set in space. They do add to the mood nicely. In a way, that almost reminds me of something like Salt Marie Celeste by Nurse With Wound, another one we've used often as bg music for writing.
listening to sounds in space is no different than using a tv antenna to catch electromagnetic signals, really. the spacecraft catches the EM signals and we reproduce them later.
I only looked in as I thought it may per chance, be the Ian Brown album of the same name being championed.
That's what I've gathered as well, it's just that sound doesn't travel in space, so you could blast the world's loudest boombox two feet away from you and still hear nothing since there's nothing to carry the sound.
It really is creepy. I first heard these sounds 3 years ago, when a friend showed me this video. In case anyone is curious, the way this works is that there are two types of waves, electromagnetic waves and mechanical waves. Mechanical waves require a medium to travel through, and one example of a mechanical wave is a sound wave. We can't hear electromagnetic waves directly, but they can induce mechanical vibrations in instruments that the human ear can detect. That's what's happening here.
this is incorrect. there is a medium for sound to travel, though a low density one ( two hundred or so particles per cubic centimeter). this is incorrect. they reproduce the sounds through a speaker. if there is no air, a microphone can pick up the oscillating charge components. this is incorrect. it got nothing to do with mechanical or EM waves. it's just that the pressure is too low for your ear to pick up.
@tionA, I don't think it has anything to do with pressure. We can't hear electromagnetic waves here on the surface of the Earth either. @AJC's explanation seems sound (pun sort of intended).
So if I did blast a stereo in space, I'd hear... something? Only a few frequencies (high or low?) or all frequencies but only very quietly? Or something else entirely? And does this mean all the TV shows and movies where explosions in space can't be heard were actually unrealistic, and the ones where you can hear them were realistic? ETA: I found this: "It's often said that in space, you can't hear yourself scream. True enough, more or less, but rather misleading. Recently, several SPACE.com readers wrote to ask how a B-flat emanating from a black hole could be detected from 250 million light-years away, as we reported earlier this month. The answer, along with related interesting facts, reveals that silence is in the ear of the beholder, and ears come in a variety of configurations. Sound can travel through space, because space is not the total vacuum it's often made out to be. Atoms of gas give the universe a ubiquitous atmosphere of sorts, albeit a very thin one. Sound, unlike light, travels by compressing a medium. On Earth, the atmosphere works well as a sound-carrying medium, as does water. The planet itself is very adept at transmitting an earthquake's seismic waves, a form of sound. Space, though not as efficient, can also serve as a medium." -Space.com The way I understand it now, since there can be some gasses and some such here and there in space, some sound can travel, but to human ears, the sounds would be way too quiet to pick up. You'd need some gear to pick up the sounds and then amplify them greatly to hear anything. Radiowaves travel, of course, but even then you need equipment that'll catch the waves, "change" them into sounds, and play them back to us, like two astronauts on a spacewalk communicating to one another via suit radios. So, for all intents and purposes, unless you have the proper gear, in space, no one really can hear you scream.
this is incorrect. EM waves in phase can be heard. and we do hear them. like all the time lol. this is incorrect. we can hear coherent sound waves in space as long as they are in phase. see reply above. the auditory ossicle does interpret kilometric waves in space into audible sound.
Can you post evidence of this? I Googled this, and everything I've read says that the human ear is incapable of hearing electromagnetic waves.
what evidence? this is common knowledge. EM oscillations per unit time on earth create pressure waves that we pick up as sound. use your brains.
No evidence? OK then, I'm going to have to assume that either you don't know what you're talking about or that you're just trolling.
If it's common knowledge, there would be a ton of evidence. Just google "common knowledge" things like how gravity works, how we can distinguish different colors etc. Google those, and you'll get more links to scientific evidence than you need. So where's the evidence to support what you replied to @thirdwind? If it's common knowledge, how come NASA doesn't know this? And here I thought they were something like experts on the matter, but if they don't know even the basics, whatever our space programs are, are totally screwed. No wonder we don't have interstellar travel yet.
EM waves don't cause changes in pressure. You might be thinking of cases where the human ear can sometimes pick up what sounds like humming at high frequencies. This is because high frequencies sometimes induce mechanical waves inside the human body, which makes it appear as if you can hear EM waves. I don't know the exact details because I'm not very knowledgeable in biophysics, but I do know that if you place an aluminum sheet between yourself and the source, the humming goes away. Yes, this is right. The density in space is so low that you would need very sensitive instruments to pick up any sound. Furthermore, even if you have a region of high density, as you move away from it, the density falls off very rapidly. You could be a few meters from a very dense cloud of dust, and you still wouldn't be able to hear an explosion that occurs in the cloud.
My apologies then. You wrote that it had nothing to do with mechanical and EM waves, which isn't the case. Can you clarify what you're trying to say?
This is stupendous. I even have somewhere an entire album with all kinds of 'music' produced by the planets, caught, if I am not mistaken, by the voyager 1 probe; I don't find it creepy, thought. It has some vast and expansive quality, like a deep breath that's held far too long, and I think it suits such visions perfectly.
