Do sound waves?

Question

Do or can sounds travel in a vacume like space

Answer 1

No -- sound waves travel only through matter (which can be in any state: solid, liquid, gas, or plasma). Only electromagnetic and gravity waves can travel through a vacuum.

Answer 2

no, sound waves are longitudinal, which means they more partilces back and forth, this is how sound waves travel. In a vacuum there are no particles for the sound waves to vibrate, therefore you can not hear anything in space as it is a vacuum. Transverse waves can though

Answer 3

No, sound waves cant travel in vacuum. Because sound is the vibration of matter, it does not travel through a vacuum or in outer space.

Answer 4

Nop, Sound wave travel through vibrating particle of space. Since vacuum doesn't have any particle to vibrate, it will not travel through vacuum.
Solid has closely packed particle, that is why sound travels faster through solid than fluid or gas.

Answer 5

No - and this is what troubled George Lucas when he made the Star Wars series of movies. He just took that liberty in his universe along with countless other movie makers. Remember the Alien tag line - "in space no one can hear you scream"?

Sound is the transfer of energy in the form of longitudinal waves and this can take place in solids, liquids and gases but not vacuum.

Answer 6

No. Sound waves do not travel in a vacuum, sound waves need a `medium` to travel, ie. air, look at a loudspeaker when it is powered up, it vibrates, these vibrations become pulses of air that pass outwards from the speaker horn, when these pulses reach your eardrum, the eardrum vibrates at the same fequency, and you here the same sound that the loudspeaker has produced.

Answer 7

Sound travels by causing pressure waves in a gas (normally air)
Therefore sound cannot travel in an absence of gas so cannot travel in a vacuum.

Answer 8

No because sound is a longutudinal wave, which unlike a transverse wave such as light, requires a medium to travel through

Answer 9

Sound waves are characterised as mechanical waves, which means that they need an elastic medium (such as air, elastic membranes, liquids, solids etc.) in order to be able to propagate. So sound waves can't travel in vacuum. We can verify that with an experiment such as the following:
We place a ticking clock inside a glass sphere and we pump as much air as possible out of the sphere. As we do that we hear the sound of the ticking clock fade out, while the clock is still working (as can be seen through the glass) which means that sound can't travel in vacuum (of course inside the sphere there isn't really vacumm but air that has a really low density, but this is enough proof).
If this experiment sounds too complicated to set up we can try another one: We place a ticking clock on the table and try to listen to its ticking. Then we place our ear on the surface of the table and we notice that the ticking (coming through the table instead of the air) is louder. From this we deduce that the denser the material, the easier for the sound to propagate. Reversing the argument we come to the conclusion that there is no sound propagation in vacuum.

Interestingly enough, there is a kind of waves that can propagate through vacuum. These are the electromagnetic waves (such as visible light, microwaves, ulrtaviolet light, X- rays, gamma rays, radio/TV waves etc.) and theis propagation is a result of conservation of energy (since in vacuum there is nothing to absorb the wave's energy, then there's nothing left for it to do but propagate!).
These waves behave in an opposite manner compared to mechanical waves. The denser the material the more diffcult it is for them to propagate. Electromagentic waves travel at the speed of light in vacuum but this speed is decreased - sometimes considerably - when they travel through materials such as glass, water, etc.

Answer 10

Sound waves can not travel through a vacuum