• Question: Can you hear in space?

    Asked by jordancoyne to Arlene, Colin, David, Eugene, Paul on 20 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: David McKeown

      David McKeown answered on 20 Nov 2012:

      You can hear is space, but you can’t make any sounds. Sounds can’t travel through a vacuum (space is a vacuum), so nothing reaches your ear for you to hear. Astronauts use radios (walkie-talkies) to talk to each other when they are doing things like space walks. This is because radio waves can travel through a vacuum so they can hear each other, but if they just shouted they wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

    • Photo: Paul Higgins

      Paul Higgins answered on 23 Nov 2012:

      think about sound like throwing a rock into a pond, and ripples travel outward. Those ripples represent sound, and when they get to a persons ear, you hear the rock splash. With sound the ripples are traveling through air, and the ripples hit against your ear drum and you hear them. In space there is no air, so sound can’t travel, like David says.
      Interestingly ripples can travel through space, but those aren’t from sound, they are from strong gravity fields stretching and distorting space itself. We call these waves, “gravitational waves”. When two black holes are orbiting eachother, or callapse together, it makes ripples in space that travel similar to how sound travels on earth through the air. Their is actually an experiment on earth “listening” for black holes stretching space: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/

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