eli5 If you can hear anything in space how are we able to get videos of what Venus or Jupiter sound like?
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We had many spacecraft that went into the atmosphere of Venus and one (Galileo) that descended through Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Apart from that, often it’s not a recording of actual sound. If some measured parameter (like the magnetic field) changes regularly then you can create a sound that has the same pattern.
For Jupiter the video people usually post isn’t the actual sound of the planet’s atmosphere but rather the radio frequencies its magnetic field emits. Send that waveform through a normal home radio and it produces an incoherent wailing, which you’d expect from a signal that’s not actually encoding anything.
For Venus we actually have landed things on the surface. They don’t last long thanks to the furnace-like conditions, but they do record vibrations from the wind so we have actual sound of Venus’ surface.
Because those videos are clickbait pseudoscience. You can take absolutely any signal and map it to any of the properties of soundwaves (frequency, amplitude, and so on) and create a sound.
I could take the letters of this post and map them to frequency values and create a melody. It wouldn’t really be “The sound of this post” as much as it’d be “the random way I arbitrarily mapped letters to sounds”.
In the case of [“planet sounds”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQL53eQ0cNA) that’s magnetic fields or other types of radiation being mapped to frequencies, amplitudes, or outright to pre-defined tones.
There are a couple methods. As someone else already mentioned, we’ve sent probes into the atmospheres of some places and sent back actual sound recordings. As another has mentioned, sometimes it’s not a sound but the frequencies of other properties, mostly magnetic fields.
But there is another cooler method that we have used: watching them with a camera. You can use a camera to actually record sound visually, by mapping the physical vibrations you can see. I am unsure if this has been done to a celestial body, but it can be. I think it’s been done on one of Jupiter’s moons?
Most of the time we aren’t. Not really. Those videos are most often taking some other form of radiation emitted by the planet and trying to “translate” it into audio. It often sounds spooky and gets the imagination going but it’s not really honest to say it’s what the planet “sounds” like
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