What Does Outer Space Sound Like? Hearing The Eternal Darkness From Light-Years Away

Sounds have always been of vital importance to us, yet aren’t normally deemed as interesting, as we hear noises every day of our lives. Unless it’s the sound of music we’re listening to, sound rarely ever comes across as fascinating.

However, a recent discovery of noises unheard of, and out of this world have been released, as NASA’s Juno Spacecraft recently entered Jupiter’s Magnetic field, an area around the planet that contains loads of useful data for scientists, as well as the discovery of new noises surrounding the gas planet.

But if sound can’t be heard through space, how precisely are we able to hear the noises from Jupiter? The answer lies in technology, and furthermore, the transmission of different kinds of sounds we don’t naturally hear. With the advancements in technology, machines can bring us the wonder and amazement of what noises would be in outer space, that our mere human ears wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear. It’s always been said that sound does not exist in space, since we can’t physically hear any of it ourselves.

Sound actually does travel through space, but is quite different than the atmosphere we’re used to, as it is found up there in the form of wavelengths — more specifically, electromagnetic vibrations that produce wavelengths, which can be picked up by instruments and converted into different sound. With the ability to translate complex wave functions into audio frequencies, we are able to hear noises we can’t hear. We’re essentially ‘hearing’ the radiation and what it would sound like for our ears. And while what we’re hearing may not directly be sound, it can technically be labelled as that.

nasa.gov

If you listen to the incredible, and almost unearthly sounds Juno picked up, they sound unlike anything we’ve ever heard before, and also sound quite creepy. Space is filled with mysteries, and being able to hear various parts of the galaxy will potentially help us answer a lot of lingering questions. Questions such as what exactly is on planets, any unknown life forms, changes in the planet’s atmosphere, and similar to the sounds of Jupiter, other planetary noises have been labelled as “spooky,” and sound like radio waves.

In order to further explore Jupiter, Juno has to go into the depths of its magnetosphere, an area where an incredible amount of particles reside, and also an impressively large structure in the solar system.

“If Jupiter’s magnetosphere glowed in visible light, it would be twice the size of the full moon as seen from Earth,” claims William Kurth of the University of Iowa, and lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation.

Juno already encountered traveling through the solar wind, and obtained the information we can now hear during the process of making the inaugural journey through both.

The ability to hear sounds we wouldn’t normally be able to hear is of vast importance, and continues to dwell on scientists from all the compelling data. We can’t hear sound in space, so it has almost never been associated with that feature, until now. Now we can only wonder how many other millions of sounds are out there. Having instruments that can convert wavelengths in outer space to audible noise may be one of the probable first forms of discovering extraterrestrial life — hearing them before seeing them, that is.

In the meantime, we should all look forward to hearing more of the crazy and mysterious sounds of space, for it can tell us new information we can’t easily get in other ways of merely searching a planet’s surface. As Juno continues to explore the depths of Jupiter’s unknown, we will get to know incredible details of one of the many gas planets.