Can we hear sound on Titan?

I know it's impossible to hear audible sound in space due to the lack of air. But say on a moon like Titan. Any other planet/ moon that say we could theoretically land on with an atmosphere, could we hear audible sounds? Like volcanoes erupting or our own communication with each other. Can we hear sounds on other planets/moons with any type of atmosphere?

Yes we can. Since any kind of matter can transmit sound waves, we can hear sound on Mars or Titan or Venus or any place with an atmosphere. Things would sound different, though, for about the same reason your voice will sound different if you breathe in helium. Basically, the sound speed of the gas the sound is being created in matters -- helium has a faster sound speed than air, which changes the wavelengths of the sounds you make, which distorts the overall sound of your voice. For that matter, you've probably noticed that things sound different when you're under water than when you're in air.

Since planetary atmospheres are made of different materials and are under different conditions -- Titan's atmosphere, for example, is mostly nitrogen, like ours, but it's about four times denser than air at sea level -- sounds will probably sound quite strange, but we'd be able to hear them or pick them up with microphones

So far, the only microphone flown to a planet with an atmosphere was on the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, which crashed in the 1990s. Mars Phoenix was supposed to get a microphone, but a bug in the attached camera's software -- which was supposed to photograph the descent -- meant that NASA couldn't turn it on without risking the lander.

June 2011, Rebecca Harbison (more by Rebecca Harbison) (Like this Answer)

Still Curious?

Get More 'Curious?' with Our New PODCAST:

Related questions:

Why does Titan, in spite of being smaller than Mars, have an atmosphere more dense than Earth's?

More questions about Planets: Previous | Next

How to ask a question:

If you have a follow-up question concerning the above subject, submit it here. If you have a question about another area of astronomy, find the topic you're interested in from the archive on our site menu, or go here for help.

URL: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=765
This page has been accessed 2493 times since June 10, 2011.
Last modified: June 10, 2011 3:53:51 PM

Legal questions? See our copyright, disclaimer and privacy policy.
Ask an Astronomer is hosted by the Astronomy Department at Cornell University and is produced with PHP and MySQL.