This Is How Space Sounds! Can You Help Researchers By Describing It? [Audio]

Space plasma physicist at Queen Mary University of London Martin Archer has recently uploaded an audio on SoundCloud made with the sounds of space. He has asked people to hear the, literally, out of the world music. The scientist wants to get feedbacks and know how you would describe the space sounds.  

First things first. Isn't empty space a vacuum where there is no medium for sound to travel through, so how can it have sounds, let alone a sound? This is the perception commonly held for empty space. However, Archer says this is not exactly true because even empty space is never absolutely empty, and there are always a few sound waves and particles floating around. Furthermore, sound waves in the space around our planet are crucial for our continued technological existence.

The Earth's magnetosphere protects us from numerous forms of dangerous space radiation called magnetosonic waves that can transfer energy around. "For example, they can give it to the radiation belts, donuts of radiation surrounding the Earth, creating 'killer electrons' at extreme energies that can damage our satellites if we're not careful,"  Martin Archer writes in The Conversation. "This is why I study these waves, if we can predict why, where and when these waves occur in the space around the Earth, then we could forecast when our satellites might be in trouble and put them into a safe mode."

Archer goes on to explain that geostationary satellites, the ones that are usually used to monitor weather, can help to listen out to 'empty' space sounds. However, scientists face a problem when it comes to distinguishing the various types of sounds that space has.

This is where, Archer adds: "your" help will come in handy, because the human auditory system is efficient at filtering sounds as it has the best known pattern recognition software. The participation of people, through the crowdsourcing comments, will help in identifying the various kinds of wave events and help with the scientific research.

To facilitate the project and get a wider audience to listen to the space sounds and describe them, the physicist has amplified the space sounds and squashed them together to make a 6-minute sound track from a whole year's recording of sounds. You can hear and leave your comment about the audio that has been uploaded to SoundCloud.