basically the title
In: 2
Sound waves need to travel through something, a solid liquid, or gas, and in space there’s nothing.
When I clap my hands, vibrations move through the air. The air wiggles. Your ear feels those vibrations, and converts them into sound. That’s how you hear anything, vibrations move through the air and hit your ears. You can still hear things underwater too, as the vibrations move through water, just bit more ~~slowly~~ faster.
But if you’re in space, there’s no air. There’s no water. There’s nothing. Those vibrations can’t travel, there’s nothing for them to travel through. So there’s no sound as a result, because any vibrations that happen don’t have anything they can move through.
EDIT: slight correction, thanks u/jcstan05.
Sound is a pressure wave, which needs a medium to travel through. Usually air, but anything will transmit sound to some degree, even solids.
But space is a vacuum so there’s nothing for the sound to travel through.
Because space is a vacuum, and there are no particles in it for *anything* to latch on to. That includes sound waves, which travel along a path of *particles* or matter of some kind to get from point A to point B. Without that, you can’t have a wave, and without the wave, you can’t have sound.
Sound is a wave propagating through matter.
To describe how it works, imagine a group of people standing packed together, like a crowd waiting to get on the subway. If I walk up behind someone in the back of the crowd and push him hard, he’s going to bump into the guy in front of him – that guy will bump into the guy in front of him, so on and so forth until the “bump” has travelled through the whole crowd up to the front.
That’s how a pressure wave works. Typically the wave goes through air, but it can just as easily go through water, or metal, or anything else.
In space, there’s no matter. So instead of a crowd of people, it’s an empty platform. I can’t propagate the bump because there’s no one for me to push.
Sound is a pressure wave in a gas, liquid or solid.
That means is atoms that move and push other atoms and the motion propagates. Because in space there is a vacuum, that manes there are extremely few atoms there you can’t get a pressure wave like that so not sound transmission.
its the same way you cant **see** water waves in the air: the air contains too little water so you cant see any waves.
in space there is too little air, so you dont **hear** the sound waves
edit: not that you dont see the waves, they basically dont even exist.
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