Viktor T. Toth :
It is often allege that phone does n’t travel in space . And it is true … inemptyspace . Sound is insistency waves , that is , propagating changes in pressure . In the absence seizure of pressure , there can be no pressure wave , so there is no sound .
But space is is not completely empty and not wholly innocent of pressure . Hence , it carries sound . But not in a manner that would match our everyday experience .
For illustration , if you were to put a speaker system in interstellar space , its membrane may be moving back and forth , but it would be super rarified for it to hit even a single particle or mote . Hence , it would fail to transfer any obtrusive sound energy to the thin interstellar medium . Even the passably denser interplanetary metier is too rarefied for sound to transfer efficiently from human scale objects ; this is why astronaut can not yell to each other during spacewalks . And just as it is impossible to reassign normal legal energy to this metier , it will also not carry it efficiently , since its atoms and molecules are too far apart , and they just do n’t bounce into each other that often . Any “ normal ” sound is attenuated to jazz .
However , if you were to make your speaker a million times bigger , and let its membrane move a million times more slowly , it would be able to transfer sound energy more efficiently even to that thin metier . And that energy would disseminate in the kind of ( diminutive ) changes in the ( already very tiny ) pressure of the interstellar sensitive , i.e. , it would be sound .
So yes , speech sound can travel in the intergalactic , interstellar , interplanetary medium , and very , very low frequency sound ( many octaves below anything you could mayhap get wind ) diddle an important role in the geological formation of social organisation ( galaxies , solar systems ) . In fact , this is the mechanism through which a catching cloud of throttle can cast its excess kinetic vitality and reverse into something compact , such as a star .
How tight do such sounds traveling , you expect ? Why , there is no set speed . The general rule is that for a so - called stark fluid ( a medium that is characterized by its denseness and pressure , but has no viscousness or stresses ) the square of the speed of speech sound is the ratio of the medium ’s pressure to its vigor density . The speed of auditory sensation , therefore , can be anything between 0 ( for a pressureless metier , which does not bear strait ) to the swiftness of lighter divided by the square root of three ( for a very hot , so - called ultrarelativistic gas ) .
This post originally come along on Quora . Clickhereto thought .
