Week 5: Sounds...in Space!

This weekend as I was wasting time on Buzzfeed, I found myself looking at an article (probably a generous term for anything on Buzzfeed, actually) about noises in space. This particular list included a few legitimate sounds (a rocket launch, a descent through Titan's atmosphere), but was mostly made up of other types of signals that had been converted to something that we as humans can hear. For example, one "sound" is the conversion of vibrational signals from the Philae lander's touchdown on a comet, and another particularly trippy noise is the slo-mo interaction between solar wind and Saturn's magnetic field.

While most people know that sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, that doesn't stop filmmakers. The sounds of TIE Fighters and space weapons in Star Wars are famous, for instance, despite being totally unrealistic. It makes sense from a filmography standpoint--silence can build suspense, but it has more trouble expressing the intensity of a space battle. If space battles were ever to become a reality, these sounds would probably have to be synthesized by a computer based on other information--sort of like most of the sounds in the Buzzfeed article.

It's interesting to think about whether there was a time when sound in space wasn't such an impossibility. The ability of sound to propagate through a fluid (liquid, gas, or plasma) is dependent on the fluid's density and compressibility. As cosmology teaches us, the Universe went from really-really-ridiculously dense at its inception to not-all-that-dense now, which means that it necessarily passed through a period of sort-of-normal-Earth-atmosphere density (all technical terms, of course). I don't know how early in the Universe's life this was or how long it lasted, but it's possible that the Universe was once a very noisy place.

*Insert TIE Figher screech*

Sources:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkasprak/cool-ass-space-noises-that-will-make-you-feel-like-an-astron
https://soundcloud.com/nasa/cassini-saturn-radio-emissions-2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_OSeRxhGOY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound#Dependence_on_the_properties_of_the_medium
http://57.media.tumblr.com/be7ebf9987a76f4dc337894f8355c641/tumblr_mtdq4muTvC1rth2h5o2_400.gif
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/state.html