“In space, no one can hear you scream.” That was the tagline of the 1979 box office film success Alien. And it’s true. Sound waves propagate mechanically as a vibration and therefore need a medium — solid, liquid or gas — to travel through. Although interplanetary (and interstellar) space is not completely empty, gas molecules and dust grains are so sparsely distributed that they do not form a continuous medium that would enable sound waves to be transmitted directly.
But there are many locations in the solar system where it might actually be quite noisy. Such places will have a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted — for example, an atmosphere or an ocean. And we have only started to explore what they sound like.
Image: https://www.techcentral.co.za
