Obviously sound can travel through space; Voyager 1 has received interstellar sounds

Yeah, I know, sorry about that. The story is a few years old, so it's hard for me to find the original story where I read about the earthquake sounds. But, I found one that explains where the sounds came from:

Sounds of Japan Earthquake and Aftershocks from Underwater Observatories

 

You are correct. Radio waves aren't sounds... and it needs to be decoded by a machine.

While we're on the topic of defining sound, what do you think about what is the Plasma vibrations, from a solar flare, that are moving a needle(?) instrument in the Voyager space probe to get a plasma reading, for scientists on the ground, because there isn't a functioning plasma sensor, as per the article description?

 

Well...when our sun has large scale solar flares or coronal mass ejections this floods space with Hydrogen Gas as a Plasma which can be both Highly Magnetic as well as capable of creating it's own Gravity Well.

AboveAlpha

 

Oh no! Not gravity! Here we go again...

Tell me about gravity. If it isn't an actual force of the universe... What is it? You said it's a singularity. Well, I don't know about quantum mechanics, so I don't know what that means...

Couldn't gravity be some kind of anti-radiation, forgive me making up terms here, but couldn't gravity represent electromagnetic waves in the negative number domain? Which, I would guess, means that it's reacting in a way exactly opposite to radiation by traveling inwards?

 

Gravity has no connection to any Electromagnetic Emission or Force or Radiation.

The Atomic Particles of Mass....Protons and Electrons are completely comprised of Quantum Particle/Wave Forms such as Quarks, Gluons, Leptons, Mesons and in particular...the Higgs-Boson.

Now this Higgs-Boson is responsible for allowing Protons and Neutrons to obtain Mass.

Anything that has MASS...no matter how big or small...will to a degree directly related to the amount of mass...Warp Space-Time....in a One Dimensional Manner.

Thus Gravity is not a FORCE but in fact an Aspect of One Dimensional Expression in Universal Space-Time Geometry.

AboveAlpha

 

I can remember swimming in our backyard pool decades ago when we would be under the water and screaming at each other, and if I recollect correctly, it didn't take much space between us when we could no longer hear each other. So based on zero science I'm guessing actual sounds, at least those that can be heard by humans, don't travel very far in mediums like water or earth and even less in space. Seismometers don't measure sound but measure seismic waves stemming from motions of the ground...so there is motion but no sound. If I go outside and listen carefully, at least with my ears, I cannot hear what the person in the radio station 50 miles from me is saying. But through radio waves and receivers and speakers I can hear that same person very clearly on my radio. Is this similar to what we are hearing from interstellar space? And if I get in my car, turn on that same radio station, and when I am 100 miles from home, I can no longer hear what is being said...it's all static or nothing at all. All I can say is if we hear interstellar sounds, then the medium which is carrying that sound must be one hell of a medium...

 

What the spacecraft have recorded in not sound per se, but the addition on matter to a vacuum. With proper equipment we can detect the plasma and energy as it progresses through space....but if we could listen with our ears, there would be nothing there.

 

We are talking about vibrations, oscillation, and pretty much the very model of a sine wave. If we can't hear something directly, with our ears, we can use a machine to move those signals into a range that our ears can hear (It's like how thermal imaging cameras can show us inferred heat, visibly, so we can see it. This process can also be done for sounds).


Soundwaves [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0)], by Qlaz (computerdesigned, self-made), from Wikimedia Commons


Our Ears work by having a sound wave vibrating against our ear drum. Water is a very good medium for sound waves to move through. But, as you've noticed, the water pressure alters the sound vibration coming out of your mouth: you are used to producing sound vibrations for the air not underwater, and this prevents your eardrums from hearing the vibrations you expect to hear as a voice underwater. If you were a sea animal who deals with this medium all the time you wouldn't have this problem.

It has to do with Frequency, the length of the sine wave is measured in a unit called Hertz.

Sound waves (20 hertz to 20,000 hertz), what we can hear, and Radio waves (3 kilohertz to 300 gigahertz), what we commonly use with radio equipment to transmit a sound to a receiver device (Radio), are two different things. Just pretend you have a Radio, and if you turn the tuning nob you can move between stations. Now these radio stations are on different frequencies, so as you move down the lineup you move from one station to another.

Likewise, the difference between Sound waves and Radio waves is their frequency. They are just two "stations" out of a much larger group. This whole group is called the Electromagnetic spectrum.


EM Spectrum Properties edit [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], by Inductiveload, NASA, from Wikimedia Commons

 

Very illuminating post...thanks!

But one thing I don't understand, is that when under water, when we were screaming at each other, we could hear each other within certain distances...but as we moved farther apart the sounds became silenced? So intuitively this tells me we can 'hear' under water but that water is not a great conductor of sound that can be heard by humans. I'm guessing if we could increase the sound decibels as the distance increases that we could hear each other over longer distances until at some point it won't work? Even if we used an artificial/mechanical sound to avoid your comment about water pressure distortion, the farther the distance the less likely we can hear it. Lastly, as a human reading a report that says we can 'hear' something, I immediately believe this means a human can hear it...but the confusion apparently is that humans can't hear any of this...

 

space is not a true vacuum

 

The sound waves need to pass through the air bubble in your lungs, throat, and mouth out through the barrier between the air and the water, and then out into the regular medium of water pressure. You expect to make a constant sound at a specific level, its frequency, but you aren't vibrating the water directly.

The process of crossing each of the barriers acts like a brake that causes the soundwave frequency to drop, and it looses power eventually falling below your range of hearing as you move farther away from the source.

In order to not experience this affect, you would need to vibrate the water directly. If you were a sea animal that wouldn't drowned from direct contact with the water you could also produce sounds, these sounds though are usually outside of the range of human hearing. Other animals have different ranges of hearing depending on the environment they live in..

 

Yes, they use the term 'hear' loosely often in the context of Radio Telescopes and other space-based detection devices that receive waves. These waves are all part of the Electromagnetic spectrum, as you know. These different waves just need different "ears" to hear them. Like satellite dishes and sensors.


Oh, but with the concept of the observation: We see light, but it's also just waves. We don't listen to light, we see it. The term they use for detecting these waves changes depending on the application.

 

I was certain that I was going to go mad reading this thread until you posted this.

Honestly, everyone, this should completely answer your questions regarding "sound" in space. Sound refers to oscillations and vibrations that can be picked up by your eardrum, transmitted through the bones in you middle ear, and finally transferred through your inner ear to your auditory nerve. Then your brain receives the sensory input, and determines what the information means/represents to effectively construct what you know as sound. Sound is - in all reality - a wave.

The Voyager spacecraft caught radio waves transmitted through space over several lightyears. It does not "hear sound", so this is merely a misunderstanding of the spacecraft's mechanics.

 

Actually you are wrong it is easier to transfer sound through denser mediums. For examply you can hear a train coming by listening to the tracks long before you hear it "over the air". Sound travels faster underwater etc.

 

I was just thinking about whales and their hearing in which they can make a noise then receive back an echo which they hear. I know their hearing system has evolved over time in order to achieve this. When they first left land and took to water, prior to their hearing adjusting for water, they must have been bumping into everything.

It's still not intuitive to me that 'sound' can travel interstellar space distances...

 

So whether it's a radio wave or light wave or any magnetic wave, is the sound we humans can hear more of a synthetic sound or a real sound?

 

The sound is real if the original Frequency is in the range: 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz, what we can hear with our eardrums.

The sound is synthetic if we have to bend, chop, stretch, pinch, or in any other way alter the sine wave Frequency to come out of the speaker in the range 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz, because whatever range of signal that goes into the machine it must come out in the range 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz or we can't hear it with our ears.

Since the waves of the Electromagnetic spectrum are really just waves of different lengths, that can be recorded by a machine, usually, Scientists get around this deficiency of our ears by just looking at the numbers on a data chart instead of trying to hear the signal with their ears.

 

This is Plasma, a state of matter so sparse and thin that electric fields created by the parts of an Atom are the primary medium that transmit the waves of the Electromagnetic spectrum.



Atoms want to have an equal number of Protons and Electrons. When there aren't an equal amount, the atom is called an Ion. These ions have a charge, either positive or negative (+-), like a battery. Ions connect to ions of the opposite charge and form connections to exchange electrons and reach equilibrium, the equal number of Protons and Electrons in each Atom.

You have probably experienced this electric field, yourself, in the form of Static Electricity.



The energy of the Electromagnetic wave causes Electrons to gain enough energy to jump out of nearby Atoms and because this alters the electrical charge of these Atoms, they need to form new fields between other Atoms to equalize the number of Protons and Electrons, causing a ripple effect outwards from the source.

 

Just read that dogs align themselves with magnetic fields when they pee...wonder if they sense or hear the magnetic fields.

Thanks for all the information...

 

So how come we can pick up the sound of background cosmic radiation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McvfJ_fIYvo

(With apologies to those whose responses I didn't read before posting mine!)

 

How do I reply to this without calling you an !@!@%?

No....sound cannot travel through a Vacuum.....PERIOD!

Sound is simply KINETIC ENERGY TRANSFER through continuous existing material....ie...air...water....earth....metal...wood....anything with Matter.

AboveAlpha

 

There are four types of waves that are generated in an earthquake. ONE of them is a sound wave through the Earth, and its the fastest traveling wave (it's called a P-wave, where P means primary since it arrives at a seismometer first). If you are close enough to an the epicenter of a large Earthquake, you can hear this wave. It sounds like rumbling thunder or maybe a train. At longer distances its energy diminishes and you can't hear it anymore, but it's still a sound wave. By the way this wave, if strong enough, can be detected on the other side of the Earth, though it has to refract through the Earth's core.

No one can hear an electromagnetic wave, and in space no one can hear you scream.

 

I thought this was taught in elementary school. What a sad state our schools are in.

 

Sadly some High Schools place more emphasis upon basically worthless classes than on all important in the 21st Century Science and Mathematics.

Although I hold multiple degrees I am a notoriously bad speller. Reason being my mind being logic based could never deal with i before e except after c.....sometimes! LOL!!!

But then I took comfort in an experiment that showed spelling was not necessary for accurate and informative communication.

Examples.....as long as you have the first letter and the last letter of any word in their proper order and the rest of the letteres inbetween if even scrabled out of order a person's mind will easily identify the word....watch.

CBALE
UEDRTASND
ALPME
BREOFE

Now everyone should be able to almost INSTANTLY know what these words really are just by looking at them for a second.

Another idiocy is Diagraming Sentences!!

Jim worked very hard today.

OK class...let's draw lines and deterine what is the......idiocy....as if I didn't know what Jim did today or how HARD he did it.

Sadly....science and math take actual thought.

AboveAlpha

 

Bad speller here too, though I'm a pretty good writer otherwise. Thank Ralph Gorin for spell check. Fortunately writing equations doesn't require much spelling.

As far as schools go, we are pitiful at teaching math and science. One of my interns remarked to me the other day, "If teachers showed us how valuable this math stuff is I would have been much more interested in learning it."

His statement pretty much summed up the school system. My thoughts are if we taught practical problems and solutions in every subject, we'd actually be teaching. I remember math students complaining about word problems. We should provide nothing other than word problems to pre-college math students.