Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/27/how-does-sound-travel-through-space.html
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Everyone knows that in space no one can hear you scream
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Spoiler alert: sound is a pressure wave propagating through a medium and cannot travel through a vacuum.
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That’s like asking how light travels through copper wire. It doesn’t.
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and aren’t we lucky? think how loud the sun would sound otherwise.
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Now, are you really sure it isn’t also a pressure particle? 
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But radio waves aren’t sound.
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Love it! Almost perfect. But it’s more of a pressure point than a pressure wave. 
This isn’t about audio, it’s about electromagnetic radiation.
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It could be a good podcast episode about the challenges of radio communications in the US space program, but personally my reaction is to the pseudo profound headline, which I can just imagine a podcast narrator with vocal fry saying over a bed of music.
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Then explain why the noise from my vacuum scares the dog every time I clean the carpet.
Check and mate, science.
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heck. my cats scatter the moment i wheel the vacuum out. somehow they are hearing the vacuum before the sound. it’s a complete violation of einsteinian physics, and yet nobody is investigating…
we still have so much to learn
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Doris Stokes has a lot to answer for.
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Cats, like other people, differ. Our most recent cat loved having her fur vacuumed. She wore a harness too, no problem. A real HILF (highly intelligent life form).
Back to OP. Sound travels through the vacuum of outer space by being encapsulated, like a pill that space can swallow to make it burp. We’ve all heard orbital burps, right? They can get pretty gross. Eww.
Maybe it’s not just the sound they fear:
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The Ansible.
“ An ansible is a category of fictional devices or technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay, even between star systems. As a name for such a device, the word “ansible” first appeared in a 1966 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since that time, the term has been broadly used in the works of numerous science fiction authors, across a variety of settings and continuities.[1]”
Getting closer every day.
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A lot of the sound we hear is transmitted through objects, including our bodies. There is a video of people working on the moon where one person is hammering something. The sound of the hammer is transmitted through the body of the hammer into the operators pressure suit, from there into their microphone and broadcast to the other astronaut.
Likewise, the lunar rover, operating in vacuum, was not silent. The motors could be heard by conduction through the structure of the vehicle.
Also, Mars is not in space. Its not in a vacuum. Sound propagates fairly well in the martian atmosphere.
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