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[ intro ]
If you’re like me, you can’t wait to see
what amazing image the James Webb Space Telescope
is going to release next.
They’re downright gorgeous,
even though these nebulas and galaxies
don’t really look like that…at least to the human eye.
Because they aren’t photographs.
They’re constructs of data gathered from invisible bands
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Some people might even say these images aren’t real images at all.
And now, scientists are something similar with sound.
You may have even heard some space recordings yourself.
like this
[ SPACE AUDIO ]
So that raises an important question.
Are all these space sounds actually lies?
The answer is kinda complicated.
Unlike light, sound waves…
also known as acoustic waves…
need a medium to travel through.
They’re only transmitted when there are particles
close enough together to get pushed along by their neighbor,
and then push their neighbor along.
Most of space is practically empty,
so you don’t get sound waves traveling between planets.
But wherever there is stuff,
you can have sound.
And that’s why scientists have plopped
a few microphones down on space rocks with atmospheres,
like Mars
[ MARS AUDIO ]
and Saturn’s moon Titan.
In 2021, the Chinese Zhurong rover captured the sounds
of its own deployment onto the red planet,
and NASA’s Perseverance rover has picked up the sound of Martian wind ,
its wheels across the ground,
and even the beat of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades.
These are all real, extraterrestrial sounds.
They just might sound a little strange to our ears,
because Mars’s atmosphere has a lower density
and temperature than Earth’s does.
But not every space sound is something that humans can perceive.
Typically, we can only hear sound waves
that have a frequency between 20 and 20,000 hertz
To visualize that, you can picture yourself bobbing around in the ocean,
with a new wave peak washing over you
between 20 and 20,000 times in a single second.
Anything outside that range is still a sound wave,
but it’s not something we can detect
and process with our fleshy anatomy.
And there are plenty of these inaudible acoustic waves in space,
typically in the form of pressure waves that wash over us
much slower than twenty times a second.
So if we want to ‘hear’ them,
we not only need an instrument that can detect them.
We have to do some processing to shift them into audible frequencies.
This is similar to the way astronomers present data
from invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,
like the stunning images from Webb,
and many other hard-working space telescopes with less street cred.
In the sound realm,
the Insight lander on Mars is equipped with seismometers
that can pick up sound-like waves
from Marsquakes and atmospheric disturbances.
These are typically around 10 Hertz,
well below the range of human hearing.
But by shifting the pitch up a couple of octaves,
scientists can paint a pretty good picture of these events with sound alone.
Like in September 2022, mission specialists reported
that they’d detected the sound of a meteoroid striking the red planet,
which sounded like this…
[ Meteor AUDIO ]
The whoosh is the object entering the Martian atmosphere,
and then the weird bloop is the sound of the meteorite hitting the ground.
But this technique has also been used to help us listen in
on even more deep and distant sounds.
At the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster,
some 230 million light years away,
there’s a black hole accelerating the matter that swirls around it into jets,
and these jets compress and expand the gas surrounding the galaxy, creating ripples.
Back in 2003, astronomers figured out that these ripples
were basically acoustic waves,
albeit far, far, below the range of human hearing.
In fact, they represent the deepest sound in the known universe.
In 2022, science communicators worked with NASA to reprocess the data,.
We now have the opportunity to hear the roar of this black hole,
pitched up an incredible 57 octaves.
[ Blackhole Audio ]
The eerie groan is created as our proverbial microphone moves around the black hole,
because the sound waves aren’t the same in every location.
So if these space sounds are lies, then they’re white lies.
They merely extend the range of our normal perception.
But there are other sounds that are downright deceitful.
Take the surprisingly subtle chirp of colliding black holes
[ Blackhole AUDIO ]
they’re not acoustic waves at all.
Instead, they’re other kinds of waves,
translated into sounds to help us understand them better.
Sometimes it’s much easier for us to hear patterns,
than to pick up trends from dry data in a graph.
NASA Webb’s First Full-Color Images,
Data Are Set to Sound
And the black hole merger chirps are a representation of ripple
s in the fabric of space-time itself.
There are even new attempts to turn pictures into sound,
by using different musical instruments
to represent the location and intensity of light in an image.
For example, that’s how we can “hear” Webb’s image
of the cosmic cliffs of the Carina Nebula…
[ Instrumental Nebula Audio ]
So sure, space sounds aren’t always quite what they seem,
and some of them may even seem more like art than science,
but there are real benefits to painting a picture with sound.
Not only are these representations
helpful for non-visual learners and the visually impaired,
they also offer scientists the opportunity
to pick out patterns that the eyes might not see.
Like in 2012, a scientist from the University of Michigan
was listening to raw data recorded from our Sun.
He heard a distinctive hum, and the pitch of that hum suggested
it was coming from the Sun’s surface as it rotated.
Ultimately, that sound helped him and his colleagues
figure out a new way to measure the Sun’s surface temperature.
So sometimes, it’s worth bending the truth just a little,
to give us the best chance at understanding our universe.
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