Can you hear noises in space

Yet that signal turned out to be robust, and the energy from that burst came from two black holes — of 36 and 29 solar masses — merging into a single 62 solar mass one.

Those missing three solar masses? They were converted into pure energy: gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of space. That was the first event LIGO ever detected.

The signal from LIGO of the first robust detection of gravitational waves. The waveform is not just Now it's over a year later, and LIGO is presently on its second run. Not only have other black hole-black hole mergers been detected, but the future of gravitational wave astronomy is bright, as new detectors will open up our ears to new types of sounds.

Space interferometers, like LISA, will have longer baselines and will hear lower frequency sounds: sounds like neutron star mergers, feasting supermassive black holes, and mergers with highly unequal masses. Pulsar timing arrays can measure even lower frequencies, like orbits that take years to complete, such as the supermassive black hole pair: OJ And combinations of new techniques will look for the oldest gravitational waves of all, the relic waves predicted by cosmic inflation, all the way back at the beginning of our Universe.

Gravitational waves generated by cosmic inflation are the farthest signal back in time humanity can There's so much to hear, and we've only just started listening for the first time. Join us then for even more about this incredible topic, and I can't wait to hear her talk.

The live blog will begin a few minutes prior to PM Pacific; join us here and follow along! The warping of spacetime, in the General Relativistic picture, by gravitational masses. Instead of "action at a distance," where an invisible force is exerted between masses, general relativity says that matter and energy warp the fabric of spacetime, and that warped spacetime is what manifests itself as gravitation. This is important, because it means that if any changes occur to a massive object's position, configuration, motion, etc.

Computer simulation of two merging black holes producing gravitational waves. This means that gravitational waves, for example, can only propagate at the speed of light. When we "detect" a gravitational wave, we're detecting the signal from when that mass configuration changed. The first signal detected by LIGO occurred at a distance of approximately 1.

Ripples in spacetime are what gravitational waves are. If gravitation traveled at infinite speed, planetary orbits would be completely unstable. There are many, many more gravitational wave signals than what LIGO has seen so far; we've only detected the easiest signal there is to detect. What makes a signal "easy" to see is a combination of its amplitude, which is to say, how much it can deform a path-length, or a distance in space, as well as its frequency.

A simplified illustration of LIGO's laser interferometer system. Because LIGO's arms are only 4 kilometers long, and the mirrors reflect the light thousands of times but no more , that means LIGO can only detect frequencies of 1 Hz or faster. Earlier this year, LIGO announced the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves.

For slower signals, we need longer lever-arms and greater sensitivities, and that will mean going to space. That's the future of gravitational wave astronomy! Time to begin and introduce Janna Levin! The inspiral and merger of the first pair of black holes ever directly observed. It took years after Einstein first put forth general relativity, and she's playing a recording! Make sure you go and listen!

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Howling planets, whistling plasma waves, and pelting space rocks: the sounds of space are spooky — and NASA compiled a list of them to make your Halloween party a little bit more nerdy. And the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan resembles the static noise coming off a TV, with a rhythmic sound going on and off in the background. But the various probes zooming through our cosmos are capable of capturing radio emissions from space objects.

These radio emissions are then converted into sound waves, and the result is the spooky sounds NASA put together into a playlist. Juno's Waves instrument recorded the encounter with the bow shock over the course of about two hours on June 24th, Sounds of a Comet Encounter : During its February 14th, , flyby of comet Tempel 1, an instrument on the protective shield on NASA's Stardust spacecraft was pelted by dust particles and small rocks, as can be heard in this audio track.

But although sound can travel through Earth, it can't travel from Earth to Mars because there's essentially no matter gases, liquids, solids in between the two planets for it to travel through. So it's not strictly true that no sound vibrations can travel through space at all, but it is true that humans would not be able to hear any sounds in space.

But in movies when they show a large space ship exploding and another spaceship nearby they often play a large exploding sound. I'm wondering in large explosions maybe not as small as a spaceship exploding, but say in a supernova could a person hear the sound because possibly the explosion releases gases in which the acoustic energy is transported through the vacuum between the explosion and some observer in a spaceship or possibly on earth if the supernova or spaceship explosion was relatively nearby?

Answer by Lynn : I know in movies a lot of times they play sounds when things explode, but I don't know of any cases where this would actually be realistic. Because space is a vacuum, gases released into space expand very quickly, and as they expand their density decreases. So say you were in a spaceship in the middle of a big space battle and a nearby ship exploded.

The exploding ship would release gases and technically sound could travel along with them. However, since space is a vacuum, these gases will spread out very rapidly and the density will drop off very fast with distance from the explosion.

If you think about it, the amount of air in the ship is probably not very large compared to the volume of space between two ships. So by the time the explosion reached your ship nearby, any sounds carried by the gas would still be too faint to hear. It seems more likely to me that what you would hear would be the shrapnel from the explosion banging into the hull of your ship.

As you point out, it depends on distance. If the your ship was directly next to the exploding ship, you would be more likely to hear something, but it would also be bad news for your ship and crew! It's pretty much the same for a supernova. The gases from a supernova explosion expand rapidly, and the density will drop off fast. I'm not sure how close you would have to be to hear a supernova, because I'm not sure where you would have to be to get densities close to Earth atmospheric values, and you might need a computer simulation to tell exactly.

But to get some idea of how the density of gas would drop off as you expand the material of a star, I did a really simple calculation. If you took a star 50 times the mass of the sun and distributed its mass over a sphere of space with a radius equal to the planet Mercury's orbital distance, the density would already be 10 times less than atmospheric density at sea level on Earth.

Mercury is pretty close to the sun, and you wouldn't be able to hear sounds even at that distance! In reality, not all the star's mass is ejected into space, and the gas that is expelled has shock waves, which are compressed.

But the basic idea is that you would have to be extremely close to get densities high enough to hear anything. So we won't ever hear a supernova explosion on Earth, for example. It's a little sad, but space really is silent. Accuracy gives way to click bait. But it makes for good click bait. Well done.

The answer is easy. Do ALL of the above. You have an instrument ready to go again. Use it! Develop new ones. Why be limited? Put an entrepreneur in charge. We get stuff done! Admin said:. In the article, there is an interesting fact that "distant light becomes radio waves as it loses energy over distance" which tells us that interstellar vacuum space is not empty but filled up with a medium to absorb the lost energy from the light.

This medium is called aether - a fluid medium for propagating light and other electromagnetic waves, which fills up the entire visible space around us. This is another evidence of the existence of aether.

Just as the speed of sound is isotropic only relative to local air, the speed of light is isotropic only relative to local aether. Thus, the existence of aether as an evidence to disproves Einstein's special relativity is as strong as the evidence to disprove special relativity: the universally synchronized time shown by all the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites is absolute, not relative as claimed by special relativity which tells us that clocks can never be synchronized relative to more than one inertial reference frame no matter how you correct them.

Xinhang Shen said:. Jabbadonut said:.