Can we hear sound in space?

Space is a vacuum, then how can we record the sounds of space?

Since there isn’t anything to conduct sound waves in space (because it is a vacuum), many people assume that sound does not exist in the vastness of the cosmos.

But in reality, there is sound in space.

What are Sound waves?

A sound wave is the pattern of disturbance caused by the movement of energy travelling through a medium (such as air, water, or any other liquid or solid matter) as it propagates away from the source of the sound.

The source is some object that causes a vibration, such as a ringing telephone, or a person's vocal cords. The vibration disturbs the particles in the surrounding medium; those particles disturb those next to them, and so on. The pattern of the disturbance creates outward movement in a wave pattern, like waves of seawater on the ocean.

The wave carries the sound energy through the medium, usually in all directions and get less intense as it moves farther from the source.

Can we hear sound in space?

The simple answer is no. We cannot hear sound 'in' space but we can hear the sound 'of' space.

There are vibrations moving through space, it is only that there are no molecules to pick them up. However, those emissions can be used to create "false" sounds (that is, not the real "sound" a planet or other object might make). How does that work?

In the 1990s, NASA explored the idea that emissions from other planets could be captured and processed so people could hear them. The resulting "music" is a collection of eerie, spooky sounds. There is a good sampling of them on NASA's Youtube site. These are literally artificial depictions of real events. It's very similar to making a recording of a cat meowing, for example, and slowing it down to hear all the variations in the cat's voice.

The space agency used instruments on several probes (like Voyager and HAWKEYE) to record these waves. Then they put them together into a recording of a sound for all of us to hear. The result is a sound that is (frighteningly) akin to what you would expect to hear echoing as you sink into a black abyss.

Hear the sounds of solar system here:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CaovBzYJdgk/

It all started with Voyager

The creation of "planetary sound" started when the Voyager 2 spacecraft swept past Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus from 1979 to 1989. The probe picked up electromagnetic disturbances and charged particle fluxes, not actual sound. Charged particles (either bouncing off the planets from the Sun or produced by the planets themselves) travel in the space, usually kept in check by the planets' magnetospheres. Also, radio waves (again either reflected waves or produced by processes on the planets themselves) get trapped by the immense strength of a planet's magnetic field. The electromagnetic waves and charged particles were measured by the probe and the data from those measurements were then sent back to Earth for analysis.

One interesting example was the so-called "Saturn kilometric radiation". It's a low-frequency radio emission, so it's actually lower than we can hear. It is produced as electrons move along magnetic field lines, and they're somehow related to auroral activity at the poles. At the time of the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn, the scientists working with the planetary radio astronomy instrument detected this radiation, speeded it up and made a "song" that people could hear. (Courtesy: ThoughtCo.com)