“In Space no one can hear you Scream”
May 12th 2011 03:05
Category: Stars
Sound : image CarlCan
Someone asked me recently can you hear the sounds of the stars? I then the remembered the tag line form the movie Alien. It’s true that in space no one can hear you scream.
Since space is a vacuum how can sound travel ,the short answer is it doesn’t, however we can simulate what an object sound like.
Spacecraft carry many instruments for measuring temperature chemical and electrical composition of a planet’s atmosphere.
The Cassini spacecraft magnetometer observed a stream of 'ion cyclotron' waves in the vicinity of the Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These waves are organised fluctuations in the magnetic field that provide information on what electrically charged molecules (ions) are present near the moon.
Technically in space there is no sound wave produced that we can hear although we can get a digital representation of what it would sound like if picked up by the human ear.
Listen to Cassini's recording.
The whole universe has a symphony of sounds we cannot readily hear.
Like the many stars in the night sky our Sun also produces sounds.
We can feel the warmth of the Sun yet we cannot hear its sounds directly.
The SOHO space craft dedicated to the monitoring the Sun can record the sounds the Sun makes by measuring the tiny fluctuation on the Sun’s surface these fluctuations are converted into something that we can hear.
You can also study the ‘sound’ of distant stars in much the same way through a telescope the light variations produced by the star can be converted to sound.
I use the analogy of the of the phonogram needle on a record the sound is picked up by the needle tracking the grooves on the record giving us a representation of sound that was previously recorded.
Twinkle Twinkle little star…… a poem form the 1700s
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!”
Did you know that the nursery rhyme has an element of truth when you read the line “like a diamond in the sky”
Since stars have an enormous amount of carbon when a star explodes in some cases the core compresses under huge pressure of gravity can produce a diamond the size of the star now that would be some diamond !
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