The old tagline "in space no one can hear you scream" has been confirmed by a South African mother loudly shouting for her children to tidy their room from 33,000 meters above the ground. Or not so loudly, as the case appears to be. The experiment, carried out by a ...
The old tagline "in space no one can hear you scream" has been confirmed by a South African mother loudly shouting for her children to tidy their room from 33,000 meters above the ground. Or not so loudly, as the case appears to be.
The experiment, carried out by a graduate engineer from Brunel University London and the BBC Radio show "The Naked Scientists," involved sending a microphone and speaker on a custom-built Screaming Satellite to near-space
to test how high-up the scream could still be heard.
People from all over the world were challenged with sending in screams and yells, with a selection of the best ultimately selected for the mission. Amongst those making the flight was Noha from South Africa, who proposed the team send a recording of her scolding her kids with a scream of "Children! Come and clean your room."
Science suggests that as the payload's altitude increases—and the air becomes correspondingly thinner—the level of the sound picked up by the microphone should decrease.
This is becausesound waves are carried by air molecules bumping into one another and the microphone. So as the air pressure drops, and there are progressively fewer particles capable of carrying the sound, the number of molecules hitting the microphone decreases—leading to a quieter recording.
This phenomenon was alluded to by the marketers of the 1979 sci-fi horror Alien And it does indeed appear to be the case the no one can hear you scream in space, as by the time the device's launch balloon burst at 33 kilometers above the Earth—the altitude at which there is only about 3/1000th of the amount of air pressure as at ground level—the screams, which were initially loud at ground level, were only just audible.
