Where does the sound go to when you’re in a spaceship in space?

The sound hits the hull, and then has nowhere to go, does it get converted into another type of energy?

  • AmalgamatedIllusions@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Yes, sound is the collective motion of particles in the form of a compression wave. As these waves propagate through a material and scatter off boundaries and inhomogeneities in general, they become less ordered and eventually indistinguishable from random atomic motion (i.e. thermal energy). However, in addition to this, sound waves can radiate away when in atmosphere. In the case of spacecraft, they can only dissipate into thermal energy and can therefore persist much longer. This is actually a problem engineers have to deal with, as unwanted vibrations can cause issues. There’s research looking into addressing this by using materials specifically designed to be highly absorbent to sound waves at particular frequencies (i.e. the collective motion of atoms at particular frequencies rapidly decays into random thermal motion).