The Sounds of Space

Sound as we normally experience it is a pressure wave moving through matter. Air, water, metal, rock, whatever. Empty vacuum does not give that pressure wave much to work with, so if you somehow took your helmet off next to Jupiter, you would have several immediate problems, but hearing Jupiter would not be one of them.

Space is full of vibrating plasma, oscillating electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions, seismic waves moving through solid worlds, atmospheric pressure waves on planets that actually have atmospheres, and even ripples in spacetime itself. We have built instruments that can measure those things, and a surprising amount of the data can either be played directly as audio or shifted into the range human ears can hear.

And for some reason, all of it sounds haunted or silly.

Before getting into this monster of a list (there's 36?!), I want to address the people typing out their 'THERE'S NO SOUND IN SPACE' comments. Yes, I know. Scientists got creative though an converted tons of data collected from missions into sounds within the range humans can hear. This is the kind of science I love. It doesn't really push humanity's understandig of the universe forward, but it's what we all want.

There are three different things people casually call "the sounds of space," and I don't want to blur them together just because they all sound like something that should be coming from a hallway in an abandoned spaceship.

The first is actual acoustic or mechanical sound: wind moving through the Martian atmosphere, Huygens descending through Titan's air, a spacecraft vibrating, a seismometer feeling the ground shake. That is the closest thing to ordinary sound.

The second is plasma, radio, electric-field or magnetic-field data. Some of these oscillations naturally occur at audio frequencies and can be played with surprisingly little modification. Others have to be slowed down, sped up or shifted in frequency before our ears can hear them.

The third is sonification. This is where scientists take data that was never sound at all — X-ray brightness, telescope pixels, gravitational-wave strain and so on — and map it into pitch, volume, stereo position or instruments. It is a legitimate way to explore data, but NASA did not secretly lower a microphone into a black hole.

Also, "all" needs an asterisk the size of Saturn. There are thousands of individual plasma-wave recordings, gravitational-wave detections and astronomical sonifications, and practically any scientific dataset can be turned into audio if somebody is determined enough. What I'm collecting here is every major distinct type of authentic space recording or well-documented scientific sonification I could trace back to real instrument data AND pair with a usable YouTube listening clip, while avoiding the endless pile of remixes and "REAL NEPTUNE FREQUENCY HEALS YOUR DNA" videos that YouTube has generously inflicted on us.

Let's get to it.

1. Saturn's Radio Emissions — Cassini, April 2002

Cassini began detecting Saturn's powerful radio emissions in April 2002 while it was still hundreds of millions of kilometers away from the planet. The emissions are connected to auroral activity around Saturn's poles, where charged particles interact with the planet's enormous magnetic field.

The recording is not a microphone hearing Saturn scream through empty space. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument measured radio emissions, and scientists shifted the frequencies downward by a factor of 44 so we could hear them. About 27 minutes of observations were also compressed into roughly 73 seconds.

And the result sounds like a machine the size of a planet slowly realizing that you are in the room with it.

The rising whistles, descending tones and bursts of static are chaotic enough to feel almost intentional. They aren't, obviously. Saturn is not communicating. It is just an enormous ball of hydrogen with a magnetosphere powerful enough to accidentally produce better horror audio than most horror movies.

2. The Perseus Black Hole — Actual Pressure Waves in a Galaxy Cluster

This one needs a special disclaimer because the sentence "NASA recorded the sound of a black hole" is both sensationalized and, in a very specific sense, not completely wrong.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster repeatedly pushes on the incredibly hot gas surrounding it. Chandra observations revealed pressure ripples moving through that gas. Pressure waves moving through matter are what sound physically is, so unlike most black-hole sonifications, there really is an acoustic phenomenon involved here.

The problem is that its natural pitch is absurdly low: roughly 57 octaves below middle C. You would need a listening apparatus considerably larger than the average pair of AirPods.

For the famous 2022 version, the pressure-wave signals were shifted upward by 57 and 58 octaves — roughly 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times their original frequencies — so humans could hear them.

The result sounds like a cathedral organ being played at the bottom of an ocean that does not exist.

This is probably the closest we're getting to hearing a black hole without becoming spaghetti.

3. M87* — A 6.5-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole Turned Into Sound

M87* is the black hole from the first-ever Event Horizon Telescope image, sitting in the center of Messier 87 about 55 million light-years away. It has a mass around 6.5 billion times that of the Sun, because apparently normal-sized black holes weren't obnoxious enough.

This audio is a sonification rather than a recording. Radio data are assigned lower tones, optical light occupies the middle, and X-rays from Chandra sit higher. Brighter regions become louder, letting you hear structure in the black hole's environment and enormous relativistic jet.

So no, M87* does not literally sound like this if you park a microphone nearby. Your microphone would hear nothing, then become part of an increasingly complicated astrophysics problem.

Still, the sonification works almost too well. It sounds metallic, distant and enormous, which is exactly the emotional reaction a 6.5-billion-solar-mass object deserves.

4. GW150914 — The First Black Hole Merger Humanity Ever Detected

On September 14, 2015, LIGO detected gravitational waves from two black holes merging about 1.3 billion light-years away. It was the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first time humanity had observed a binary black-hole merger this way.

This is not sound traveling through space. Gravitational waves are distortions in spacetime itself. The frequencies of the final inspiral happen to pass through the human-audible range, though, so LIGO can convert the measured strain into an audio signal with remarkably little conceptual gymnastics.

And after all that buildup — two black holes, each around 30 times the mass of the Sun, spiraling together and briefly radiating an unbelievable amount of energy — the universe gives us:

"bwoop."

That's it.

The most violent merger humanity had ever directly observed sounds like somebody flicking a water droplet off a spoon.

I love black holes.

5. GW170817 — Two Neutron Stars Colliding

GW170817 came from two neutron stars spiraling together in 2017. Because neutron stars are much lighter than the black holes in GW150914, their inspiral remained in LIGO's detectable frequency range much longer. Instead of a tiny quick chirp, you get a signal that climbs steadily upward in pitch as the stars orbit faster and faster.

The merger also produced light across the electromagnetic spectrum, making it one of the most important multi-messenger astronomy events ever observed.

The audio sounds like an electronic tone being wound tighter and tighter until reality finally gives up. These sounds are not at all what I expected to hear when researching this list. The universe is a wolf in a sheep's clothing.

6. Mercury's Magnetic Field During BepiColombo's First Flyby

During BepiColombo's first Mercury flyby on October 1, 2021, its magnetometer measured the changing magnetic environment as the spacecraft passed from the solar wind into Mercury's magnetic field and back out again.

ESA turned those measurements into audio using synthesizers controlled by the strength and variation of the magnetic field. That makes this firmly a sonification, but one directly driven by the spacecraft's measurements.

You can hear the character of the signal change as BepiColombo crosses different regions around Mercury. It has this low electronic pulsing quality that sounds less like the smallest planet in the Solar System and more like the engine room of a ship that definitely has an emergency light flashing somewhere.

Mercury: tiny planet, deeply unnecessary soundtrack.

7. BepiColombo Physically Flexing During Its Sixth Mercury Flyby

This one is different because the spacecraft itself is the thing vibrating.

During BepiColombo's sixth and final Mercury flyby on January 8, 2025, an accelerometer measured tiny mechanical vibrations throughout the spacecraft. The data include things like fuel movement, solar-panel vibrations, thermal changes and the spacecraft structure responding as Mercury's gravity pulls unevenly on it.

ESA compressed about an hour of measurements into roughly a minute and shifted the vibrations into a range we can hear.

There are soft bangs, low rumbles and a background hum that changes as the spacecraft moves through Mercury's shadow and back into sunlight. At points, the whole thing sounds like an old submarine slowly being crushed somewhere below you.

Nothing is actually going wrong. BepiColombo is just flexing normally.

8. Venus' Ionosphere — Parker Solar Probe's Accidental Listening Session

While Parker Solar Probe was using Venus for a gravity assist on July 11, 2020, it passed only about 833 kilometers above the planet and its FIELDS instrument picked up a low-frequency natural radio emission from Venus' ionosphere.

It was the first direct measurement of the Venusian upper atmosphere in roughly three decades and gave researchers another way to study how the ionosphere changes with the Sun's activity.

When converted to audio, the signal has a brief rising, electric howl to it. It is not the atmosphere "making noise" in the everyday sense; it is radio-frequency plasma behavior translated for human ears.

Venus already has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, sulfuric-acid clouds and crushing atmospheric pressure. Apparently the ambient soundtrack needed to be threatening too.

9. The Sun's Global Oscillations

The Sun physically oscillates. Its surface rises and falls in complicated patterns as waves move through the solar interior, and studying those vibrations — helioseismology — lets scientists probe structures we cannot directly see.

SOHO's Michelson Doppler Imager measured motion on the solar surface over 40 days. Scientists filtered the data and sped it up by about 42,000 times to bring the oscillations into the range of human hearing.

The result is a deep, steady droning tone with a faintly mechanical texture.

Obviously you would not stand near the Sun and hear this through the vacuum. Also, standing near the Sun has several other flaws as an observation strategy.

Still, hearing our star reduced to a low rumble makes it feel less like a light in the sky and more like what it actually is: an enormous moving ball of plasma with its own internal weather, waves and vibrations.

10. Langmuir Waves Near the Sun — Parker Solar Probe

Parker Solar Probe's FIELDS instruments have recorded multiple kinds of plasma waves close to the Sun, and Langmuir waves are among the strangest.

These are rapid oscillations of electrons in plasma. When the measured electric-field variations are made audible, they can produce an almost pure, high electronic tone.

The important part is that the spacecraft is not picking up air vibrations. It is measuring electrical behavior in the solar plasma around it. But because plasma waves can naturally oscillate at frequencies our ears recognize, the translation between physics and sound can be surprisingly direct.

It sounds like a medical monitor designed by somebody who hates patients.

11. Whistler-Mode Waves Near the Sun — Parker Solar Probe

The same Parker Solar Probe measurements contain whistler-mode waves, named because of their characteristic falling or sweeping tones when converted to audio.

Whistler waves are electromagnetic plasma waves that can interact strongly with charged particles. Around Earth, related waves play an important role in our radiation belts. Parker has detected versions of them much closer to the Sun, letting scientists study how energy moves through the young solar wind.

They sound exactly like the noise a 1970s science-fiction computer would make immediately before telling the crew that oxygen reserves are at nine percent.

Plasma doing plasma things.

12. Parker Solar Probe's Dispersive Chirps

Another Parker signal comes across as rapid chirps whose pitch changes because different frequencies in the plasma propagate differently.

These are useful scientifically because the shape of a chirp can reveal information about the plasma and magnetic environment the spacecraft is moving through. To a physicist, it is a diagnostic signature. To the rest of us, it sounds like something invisible keeps pinging the hull.

The weirdest part of space audio is how often the scientifically correct explanation is more interesting than the spooky one. There is no creature outside Parker Solar Probe.

There is just a near-Sun plasma environment so energetic and structured that its electric fields naturally produce audio-like patterns.

13. Earth's Chorus Waves

Earth has its own collection of space noises, and chorus waves are probably the prettiest.

These electromagnetic waves form in the magnetosphere as energetic electrons interact with Earth's magnetic field. When converted to audio, they produce rapid rising tones that sound remarkably like birds chirping at dawn, which is where the name comes from.

They are not birds.

I feel like that clarification should be unnecessary when we're discussing the radiation belts thousands of miles above Earth, but the resemblance is honestly pretty strong.

The sound is almost peaceful until you remember it is being generated by charged particles spiraling through Earth's magnetic environment while radiation-belt electrons are being accelerated and scattered around them.

14. Earth's Whistlers

Whistlers are one of my favorite examples because their origin can begin with something completely ordinary: lightning.

A lightning strike releases broadband electromagnetic energy. Some of that energy can escape into the magnetosphere and travel along Earth's magnetic-field lines. Different frequencies travel at different speeds, so when the signal is received and played as audio, the higher frequencies arrive first and the pitch slides downward.

That produces the classic falling whistle.

Imagine telling somebody in 1850 that lightning on one side of the planet can launch electromagnetic energy into space, guide it along Earth's magnetic field and produce a descending alien whistle thousands of miles away.

They would ask you to leave.

15. Earth's Auroral Kilometric Radiation — The Northern Lights Have a Radio Voice

Earth itself is a surprisingly powerful radio transmitter. Above the auroral regions, energetic electrons moving through our magnetic field generate auroral kilometric radiation, or AKR, usually at frequencies around 100 to 500 kilohertz. Those frequencies are well above what we hear normally, so the recording has to be slowed down before human ears get invited to the meeting.

Once it is shifted into our range, Earth sounds less like the cozy blue marble from every elementary-school poster and more like a malfunctioning beacon somebody left running above the Arctic.

The emissions are tied to the same broader magnetospheric activity that produces auroras. In other words, the northern lights do not literally make this noise in the atmosphere, but the charged-particle system producing those lights is also generating intense radio waves high above the planet. Similar auroral radio emissions have been detected at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

16. Apollo 10's "Outer-Space Music" Behind the Moon

During Apollo 10's 1969 mission, the crew separated the command module and lunar module while circling the Moon. On the far side, cut off from radio contact with Earth, they began hearing a weird whistling tone through their headsets.

Gene Cernan described it as "outer-space-type music." The crew wondered whether anybody would believe them.

Unfortunately for aliens, the explanation is much less dramatic: radio interference between the VHF systems on the command module and lunar module. Apollo 11's Michael Collins later described hearing the same basic thing and wrote that radio technicians had already explained it.

So this is not a natural sound produced by the Moon. It is spacecraft electronics accidentally making an eerie tone in exactly the worst possible location to hear an unexplained eerie tone.

If I were alone behind the Moon in 1969 and my headset suddenly started going "wooooooo," I would also have some questions.

17. Jupiter's Auroral Radio Emissions — Juno

Jupiter's auroras make Earth's look like somebody forgot to turn the brightness up.

Juno's Waves instrument measured radio emissions associated with Jupiter's auroral regions on August 27, 2016. About 13 hours of data were compressed into roughly 25 seconds, and the original frequencies — roughly 7 to 140 kilohertz — were shifted into the human-audible range.

The result is a frantic mix of descending whistles, bursts and electronic squeals.

Jupiter already has storms larger than Earth, metallic hydrogen under insane pressure, a radiation environment that actively tries to murder spacecraft electronics and a moon that is basically a volcanic panic attack.

18. Jupiter and Io's Radio Interaction

Io does not simply orbit Jupiter quietly like a well-behaved moon.

The moon moves through Jupiter's magnetic field while spewing volcanic material into space. Electric currents connect Io and Jupiter, and the interaction can produce powerful decametric radio emissions. Juno has flown through regions where those radio waves are generated, helping scientists pin down where the signals originate.

When those radio measurements are shifted into audio, you get a dense, warbling electronic howl.

It sounds like Jupiter is yelling at Io.

Given that Jupiter's gravity is also flexing Io hard enough to power hundreds of volcanoes, that relationship was already a little toxic.

19. Jupiter's Bow Shock

The solar wind flows outward from the Sun at supersonic speeds. When that stream of charged particles runs into Jupiter's gigantic magnetic obstacle, it has to slow and divert around it, producing a bow shock in the plasma.

Spacecraft can detect the sudden change in electric and magnetic wave activity as they cross that boundary. In audio, the transition arrives as a sudden wall of turbulent noise.

It is the plasma equivalent of hitting rough water, except the "water" is an ionized particle stream moving through interplanetary space and the "boat" is a spacecraft built by people who had to calculate all of this before launch.

20. Jupiter's Magnetopause

After Juno crossed Jupiter's bow shock in June 2016, it later passed through the magnetopause — the boundary where pressure from the solar wind balances Jupiter's magnetic field.

The Waves data change dramatically across that boundary. Converted to sound, the transition has this strange shift from turbulent broadband noise into a different electrical environment, almost like somebody changed rooms while leaving the recorder running.

Which, in a way, is exactly what happened.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is so enormous that if you could see it from Earth, it would appear larger in the sky than the full Moon despite Jupiter being hundreds of millions of kilometers away.

21. Jupiter's Chorus Waves — Voyager 1

Earth is not the only planet with chorus waves.

Voyager 1 recorded Jovian chorus during its March 1979 flyby. The waves are generated by energetic electrons in Jupiter's radiation belts spiraling along magnetic-field lines. The audio was slowed by a factor of four to make the rising tones easier to hear.

It chirps, squeaks and whistles like a flock of electronic birds trapped inside a transformer.

The fact that similar plasma physics can create related chorus signatures around multiple magnetized planets is extremely cool. The fact that Jupiter's version sounds like the birds have unionized against you is also worth noting.

22. Ganymede's Magnetic Environment — Juno Flyby

Ganymede is already weird because it is the only moon in the Solar System known to generate its own intrinsic magnetic field.

During Juno's June 7, 2021 flyby, the Waves instrument measured electric and magnetic radio emissions as the spacecraft passed through Ganymede's environment. Scientists shifted the frequencies down into our hearing range.

About halfway through the audio, the character changes abruptly as Juno moves into a different region of the magnetosphere.

It is one of those recordings where the science is visible to your ears. You don't have to understand the spectrogram to notice that the spacecraft just crossed a boundary. I don't know what I've learned, but I'm happy I got to experience it.

23. Europa's Plasma Environment — Juno Flyby

Juno passed only about 350 kilometers above Europa on September 29, 2022, screaming past one of the most interesting worlds in the Solar System.

Its Waves instrument captured roughly an hour and a half of plasma-wave data around the encounter. Variations in the frequencies help scientists infer changes in plasma density and the electromagnetic environment around the moon.

The audio rises and falls in these layered electronic tones that sound almost too clean to be natural.

Europa may hide a global saltwater ocean beneath its ice. We have no evidence that anything is alive in it, but I would like to formally request that if we ever drill through the crust, the first microphone be turned on very carefully.

We've established a pattern here.

24. Lightning on Jupiter — Voyager

Voyager detected electromagnetic signatures from lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere, helping confirm that thunderstorms are not an Earth-exclusive hobby.

The audio representation comes across as crackles and bursts of static, similar in spirit to what lightning can do to an AM radio here on Earth.

This is not a microphone floating in Jupiter's clouds. It is the electromagnetic signature of lightning detected by spacecraft instruments and rendered as sound.

Still, there is something uniquely unpleasant about hearing lightning from a planet where storms can be larger than Earth and cloud layers descend into pressures that would make our weather forecasts look adorable.

Jupiter continues to be a terrible vacation destination.

25. Saturn and Enceladus Talking Through Plasma Waves

Enceladus shoots water vapor, ice grains and other material from its south-polar fractures into space. That material becomes ionized and interacts with Saturn's magnetic environment, creating a plasma connection between moon and planet.

Cassini's RPWS instrument recorded the plasma-wave activity on September 2, 2017. About 16 minutes of data were compressed to around 28.5 seconds, with frequency reduced by a factor of five.

The result sounds like whistles and electronic squeaks passing back and forth over static.

Calling it Saturn and Enceladus "talking" is obviously anthropomorphizing plasma physics.

But listen to it and tell me that phrasing isn't emotionally efficient.

26. Lightning on Saturn — Cassini

Saturn also has lightning, and Cassini detected powerful radio bursts from storms deep in its atmosphere.

This recording represents a strong storm observed beginning January 23, 2006. The lightning-related radio bursts were shifted into the audible range, and roughly two hours of observations were compressed into 28 seconds.

The pops and crackles sound eerily familiar because lightning on Earth can produce similar interference in radios. That little bit of familiarity makes it worse, not better.

It is like hearing a thunderstorm from home, except the thunderstorm is happening inside Saturn.

27. Cassini's "Big Empty" Between Saturn and Its Rings

Before Cassini made its first Grand Finale dive between Saturn and the innermost edge of the rings on April 26, 2017, engineers were worried about dust particles hitting the spacecraft at enormous speed.

Cassini's RPWS antennas could detect tiny dust impacts as voltage spikes, which become pops and cracks in audio. During earlier ring-plane crossings, the spacecraft heard plenty of them.

Then it entered the gap next to Saturn and heard almost none.

Instead, the recording is mostly strange plasma whistles and sparse noise. Scientists quickly nicknamed the region "the Big Empty" because it was dramatically less dusty than expected.

For a mission ending in a deliberate plunge into Saturn, discovering an unexpectedly empty corridor right before the finale feels narratively suspicious.

28. Saturn's Bow Shock — Cassini

Cassini crossed Saturn's bow shock on June 27, 2004, where the supersonic solar wind slams into the obstacle created by Saturn's magnetic field.

The RPWS instrument saw an abrupt burst of electric-field noise caused by currents in the shock. Researchers compressed 28 minutes of observations into a 10-second audio clip.

There is very little subtlety to it. The sound suddenly becomes loud and turbulent, exactly where the spacecraft crosses the shock boundary.

29. Dust Smacking Into Cassini While Crossing Saturn's Rings

On December 18, 2016, Cassini crossed the faint Janus-Epimetheus ring. Tiny dust-sized particles struck the spacecraft and its long RPWS antennas at high speed, vaporizing into tiny clouds of plasma and producing electrical impulses the instrument could detect.

Those impacts become distinct pops and cracks in the audio.

This is one of the more physically intuitive entries on the list because you are basically hearing a spacecraft get peppered by microscopic debris, just through an electrical detector instead of a microphone bolted to the hull.

The number of impacts rises as Cassini enters the denser part of the ring and falls as it leaves.

30. Titan's Atmosphere — Huygens Actually Had a Microphone

This one is important because Titan has an atmosphere dense enough to carry ordinary acoustic pressure waves.

When ESA's Huygens probe descended through Titan's thick nitrogen atmosphere on January 14, 2005, its instrument package included an acoustic sensor. Audio from the descent captures rushing, buffeting noise as the probe falls beneath its parachute toward an orange world more than a billion kilometers from Earth.

No radio-wave translation is needed to explain why sound can exist there. Titan has air — not air you'd enjoy breathing, but enough gas for pressure waves to propagate normally.

There is something deeply different about hearing this one. Plasma-wave sonifications feel like interpreting space. Huygens sounds like being there.

And "there" is the surface of Titan.

31. Uranus — Voyager 2 Plasma-Wave Audio

Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft ever to visit Uranus, passing the planet in January 1986. Its Plasma Wave System collected wideband electric-field data around the encounter, and the University of Iowa has released extended authentic audio from the flyby.

The waveform data can often be played almost directly as audio because the instrument sampled electric-field variations at audio-like rates. That does not mean every squeal and buzz comes from Uranus itself. Spacecraft instruments can pick up interference from onboard systems too, which is why the unedited recordings are scientifically interesting but messier than the polished "planet sounds" compilations online.

The real thing sounds stranger anyway.

32. Neptune — Voyager 2's 1989 Encounter

Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in August 1989, the only spacecraft ever to visit the planet. Its Plasma Wave System again collected electric-field waveform data through the encounter.

The resulting extended audio is raw and weird: hisses, tones, changing interference and stretches where the spacecraft's own electronics contribute noticeably to what you're hearing.

This is a machine built in the 1970s flying past Neptune and sending us electrical waveforms from 4.5 billion kilometers away. It does not need help from a reverb plugin.

Mars changes the game because its atmosphere is thin, but it is absolutely thick enough to carry sound. Perseverance became the first rover to routinely record another planet with microphones, and suddenly "sounds of space" stopped being entirely metaphorical.

33. The First Recorded Martian Wind — Perseverance

About 18 hours after Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021, its SuperCam microphone captured one of the simplest and most profound recordings on this list: wind.

You can hear the rover's own mechanical noise, and after filtering that down, a faint gust moves across the microphone. It is quiet and muffled because Mars' atmosphere is less than one percent as dense as Earth's at the surface.

There is nothing musically dramatic about it. That's what makes it hit so hard. For a few seconds, another planet stops being an image and becomes a place with weather.

34. Perseverance Driving Across Mars

Perseverance's wheels are metal, and metal wheels rolling across rock do not sound particularly healthy even when everything is working perfectly.

The rover's microphone captured the grinding, clanking, squeaking noise of its wheels crossing the Martian surface. Some of the sound travels through the atmosphere, while mechanical vibration from the rover itself also contributes.

Engineers expected weird noises because metal wheels and rocks are not quiet friends. The recordings are still useful because changes in the sound can potentially reveal information about the rover's mechanical condition and the surface under the wheels.

35. SuperCam's Laser Zapping Rocks on Mars

Perseverance carries a laser that vaporizes tiny spots on rocks so SuperCam can analyze the resulting plasma and determine what the material is made of.

The laser also makes an audible snap when it hits the target.

On March 2, 2021, the microphone recorded 30 laser shots striking a rock target called Maaz about 3.1 meters away. Differences in the loudness and character of the pops can give scientists information about the rock's physical properties.

Humanity sent a robot to Mars, gave it a laser, and then discovered we could learn geology by listening to the laser shoot rocks.

36. Ingenuity Flying — The First Aircraft Heard on Another Planet

During Ingenuity's fourth flight on April 30, 2021, Perseverance's SuperCam microphone recorded the helicopter flying tens of meters away.

That means this is actual acoustic sound from one human-made aircraft being picked up by another human-made machine on another planet.

The rotor noise is faint because Mars' thin atmosphere strongly attenuates sound, but scientists could isolate the helicopter's blade-passing frequency at around 84 hertz.

I don't think this one gets enough credit for how absurd it is. For most of human history, the sound of powered flight only existed on Earth. Then we put a tiny helicopter on Mars and another robot sat nearby listening to it go by.

37. A Martian Dust Devil Passing Directly Over Perseverance

On September 27, 2021, a dust devil passed directly over Perseverance while the rover happened to have its microphone running.

The recording captures changes in wind and pressure as the vortex crosses the rover, plus tiny ticking impacts from dust grains hitting the microphone area.

This was the first direct audio recording of a Martian dust devil.

The whole clip is short, but it feels incredibly physical. You are hearing a weather system cross a robot on Mars. For a moment, the planet is not silent, distant or abstract. It is windy and dusty and throwing tiny grains at our expensive equipment.

38. Electrical Sparks Inside Martian Dust Storms and Dust Devils

Perseverance has now detected tiny electrical discharges associated with dusty Martian weather.

As dust grains collide and rub against each other, they can exchange charge. Under the right conditions, that charge produces miniature sparks. The SuperCam microphone and electromagnetic measurements picked up crackling signatures during dust events, including at least one pressure-wave signal consistent with an actual spark.

The audio sounds like faint static clicks.

39. InSight Hearing Martian Wind Through the Ground and Spacecraft

Before Perseverance brought dedicated microphones, InSight found a wonderfully indirect way to "hear" the Martian wind.

Wind blowing across the lander and its large solar panels caused tiny vibrations. InSight's seismometer detected those vibrations, while an air-pressure sensor separately measured the changing pressure.

Scientists shifted the seismometer data into the audible range, producing a low rumble that represents the lander physically responding to wind.

It is not a microphone recording, but it is mechanical vibration caused by actual Martian weather.

40. The First Likely Marsquake Detected by InSight

On April 6, 2019 — InSight's 128th Martian day — the lander's seismometer detected a faint seismic signal believed to have originated inside Mars.

The raw vibration is far below the normal range of human hearing, so scientists sped the data up dramatically to make it audible.

What you get is a low rumble and strange scratchy vibration, the sound representation of another planet's crust moving.

Earthquakes are normal to us because we live on a geologically active planet. Hearing the same basic physical concept from Mars feels different.

Somewhere under that red surface, rock moved, a wave traveled through the planet, and a robot we built noticed.

That sentence would have gotten you burned as a wizard a few centuries ago.

41. InSight's "Dinks and Donks"

Not every strange sound InSight detected came from Mars itself.

As temperatures changed dramatically between day and night, parts of the seismometer and its protective structures expanded, contracted and shifted. That thermal stress produced strange metallic clicking noises the team nicknamed "dinks and donks."

The processed recordings sound like somebody lightly tapping on a pipe somewhere under the lander.

Nothing mysterious was crawling around outside. The instrument was just reacting to the Martian temperature cycle.

Because if we ever do record tapping from outside the lander, I would prefer the first scientific paper to take its time.

42. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko "Singing"

Rosetta's instruments detected oscillations in the magnetic/plasma environment around comet 67P in 2014 at frequencies around 40 to 50 millihertz — far below human hearing.

ESA multiplied the frequency by roughly 10,000 to bring it into the audible range.

The result is one of the strangest sounds in the entire catalog: a low warbling croak that genuinely sounds like something alive groaning in the dark.

Scientists were still working out the exact plasma process producing the waves when the discovery was announced. What we do know is that the comet itself was releasing gas and charged particles as it approached the Sun, creating an evolving plasma environment around it.

The comet is not actually singing.

It just has a better doom-metal vocal than I do.

43. Philae Touching Down on Comet 67P — Actual Mechanical Vibration

This is another one that gets much closer to ordinary sound.

When Rosetta's Philae lander touched comet 67P on November 12, 2014, sensors in the landing gear recorded mechanical vibrations from the impact. According to ESA, the audio representation did not require changing the time or frequency; the amplitude was normalized so we could hear it.

You are essentially listening to the moment a human-built machine physically made contact with a comet.

It sounds like a short crunching thud followed by vibration.

That is it.

No giant cinematic boom. No orchestra. Just a little mechanical "thunk" after a journey of more than a decade.

Space exploration has incredible comedic timing.

44. Stardust Getting Sandblasted by Comet Tempel 1

NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew past comet Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011. Its Dust Flux Monitor measured thousands of tiny particles striking the spacecraft during the encounter.

Researchers converted those impact detections into audible clicks. Around 5,000 impacts were recorded over roughly 11 minutes.

The sound starts sparse, builds into a violent crackling barrage near closest approach and then fades again.

This one is excellent because the audio makes the particle environment immediately understandable. A graph can tell you the dust density increased.

The sound tells you the spacecraft just drove through cosmic sleet at kilometers per second.

Much more persuasive.

45. Voyager 1 Hearing Interstellar Plasma

After Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space, its Plasma Wave System detected oscillations in the thin ionized gas between stars.

Unlike a lot of space audio, these plasma oscillation frequencies already fall within the human-audible range. Scientists mostly needed to amplify and present the data rather than invent a completely different frequency mapping.

The recording contains rising whistle-like tones from plasma events observed in 2012 and 2013. The pitch gives researchers a way to estimate electron density: higher plasma frequency means denser plasma.

Voyager is now so far away that radio commands from Earth take nearly a full day to reach it, and it is still occasionally sending back the electrical equivalent of "the stuff out here sounds like this."

Built in the 1970s.

No notes.

This last section gets deeper into sonification. These objects generally are not producing audible pressure waves that travel across interstellar vacuum to us. We are turning telescope or radio data into sound so our ears can inspect patterns our eyes usually get first dibs on.

46. Kepler Star KIC 12268220C

NASA's Kepler telescope measured tiny changes in the brightness of stars over time. Those light curves can be translated into audio, letting brightness variations drive an audible signal.

KIC 12268220C produces a strangely pulsing, fluctuating tone when its data are sonified.

This is emphatically not a microphone recording a star through space. It is stellar brightness data mapped into sound.

But stars physically oscillate, rotate, flare and host spots, and those processes leave patterns in the light we receive. Sonification gives our ears another way to notice those patterns.

It is basically astronomy deciding vision has had the dataset long enough and passing it to hearing for a minute.

47. Kepler Star KIC 7671081B

Another Kepler light curve produces a different texture when mapped into audio, which is exactly why these stellar sonifications are interesting.

Different stars vary in different ways. Some pulse. Some rotate with starspots moving across their surfaces. Some host companions or planets that create periodic changes. Turning the light curve into sound can make repetition and rhythm jump out immediately.

KIC 7671081B has a droning, modulated character that feels weirdly organic despite being based on photometric measurements.

Again: not literal starlight making a noise in your speaker.

It is data.

Very creepy data, though.

48. Pulsar PSR B0329+54 — A Dead Star Beating Like a Clock

Pulsars are neutron stars whose magnetic beams sweep across Earth like cosmic lighthouse beams. Radio telescopes detect a pulse each time the beam crosses us, and those pulses can be converted directly into audible clicks or beats.

PSR B0329+54 rotates about once every 0.715 seconds, so its pulse train sounds like a steady mechanical heartbeat.

There is no giant speaker attached to the neutron star. The radio telescope is detecting electromagnetic pulses and mapping their intensity to audio.

Still, a stellar corpse spinning in space and hitting Earth with a radio flash every fraction of a second is already sufficiently creepy without embellishment.

It sounds exactly as punctual as a neutron star should.

49. Millisecond Pulsar PSR B1937+21 — Around 642 Rotations Per Second

Now take the pulsar idea and remove any remaining sense of reasonable scale.

PSR B1937+21 rotates roughly 642 times every second. At that speed, individual radio pulses blend into a continuous tone when represented as audio.

A neutron star can contain more mass than the Sun inside a sphere about the size of a city. Some of them are then "recycled" by accreting matter from a companion star and spun up to hundreds of rotations per second.

The audio sounds like an electronic buzz because, from our perspective, that stellar remnant is flashing hundreds of times per second with absurd regularity.

If you designed this for science fiction, somebody would tell you to tone it down.

50. The Crab Nebula — A Supernova Remnant Sonified

The Crab Nebula is what remains of a star that exploded in 1054, leaving a rapidly spinning neutron star at its center.

For this sonification, X-ray data from Chandra, optical data from Hubble and infrared data from Spitzer are assigned different instrument families and pitch ranges. Brighter areas become louder, and vertical position affects pitch.

This is a composed mapping of telescope data, not physical noise propagating from the nebula.

But the Crab is already one of the most chaotic objects in the sky: a pulsar pumping energy into an expanding cloud of supernova debris, with relativistic particles and magnetic fields whipping around the remnant.

Turning it into sound somehow makes the structure feel even more unstable.

Like the explosion never really finished.

51. Cassiopeia A — Hearing the Elements in a Supernova Remnant

Cassiopeia A is the debris from a massive star that exploded a few hundred years ago from Earth's perspective.

Chandra can map emission from different elements inside the remnant, including silicon, sulfur, calcium and iron. In this sonification, those distributions are assigned different sounds as the scan moves outward from the neutron star near the center.

The volume follows intensity, so denser or brighter structures become louder.

What I like about this one is that the audio is not just decorative. You can literally hear the spatial distribution of different chemical elements forged and thrown outward by a dead star.

The universe took nuclear physics, an explosion and a spectral map, then somehow ended up with a soundtrack that sounds like glass instruments being played in a cave.

Of course it did.

52. Tycho's Supernova Remnant

Tycho's supernova remnant comes from the stellar explosion observed by Tycho Brahe and others in 1572.

The Chandra sonification starts near the center and sweeps outward. Different X-ray colors associated with elements such as iron, silicon and sulfur are mapped to different pitches. Some of the X-ray frequencies are also shifted downward by dozens of octaves into the human-audible range.

There is something uniquely eerie about hearing a pattern encoded in debris from a star people watched explode more than 450 years ago.

The light reached Renaissance astronomers first.

Centuries later, we turned the remnant into audio because apparently seeing a dead star wasn't enough sensory coverage.

53. The Bullet Cluster — Dark Matter and Hot Gas Mapped Into Sound

The Bullet Cluster is actually two galaxy clusters that collided, producing one of the most famous observational demonstrations that most of the system's mass is not located where the ordinary hot gas is.

X-ray observations trace the hot gas, while gravitational lensing maps where the bulk of the mass — dominated by dark matter — lies.

For the sonification, the dark-matter map occupies lower frequencies, galaxies sit in the middle, and X-ray gas gets the higher tones. Position in the image influences pitch as the scan moves across the collision.

To be clear, this is not "the sound of dark matter." We still do not know what dark matter fundamentally is.

It is the sound of data showing where dark matter's gravity appears to be.

Which is honestly a much better sentence anyway.

54. The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

M51 is the Whirlpool Galaxy, one of the most photogenic spiral galaxies in the sky and therefore one of the universe's most successful profile-picture decisions.

Its sonification combines infrared, optical, ultraviolet and X-ray observations. Different wavelengths occupy different frequency ranges, while the mapping follows the galaxy's spiral structure. A low hum marks the bright core, and compact sources produce shorter notes as the scan moves around the image.

The result sounds surprisingly musical, but none of that means M51 is literally broadcasting a song across 31 million light-years of vacuum.

It means the galaxy's structure contains patterns that can be represented coherently in more than one sensory language.

Which might actually be cooler.

SO WHAT DOES SPACE ACTUALLY SOUND LIKE?

Mostly, it doesn't.

If you floated between the planets without a suit, your ears would not be filled with Saturn screams, pulsar beats and black-hole drones. Ordinary sound needs matter dense enough to carry pressure waves, and most of space is nowhere near dense enough.

But "space is silent" is one of those technically correct statements that becomes misleading if you stop there.

The universe is absolutely full of oscillations.

We built instruments clever enough to measure those patterns and translate them into something the human nervous system can hear.

And apparently the human nervous system's first response is:

Many plasma and electromagnetic phenomena naturally contain sweeps, whistles, chirps, bursts, hisses and broadband noise; exactly the kinds of sounds our brains have learned to associate with machines, alarms, distant animals and things going wrong in the dark. Then sonification takes entirely different datasets and maps structure into pitch and volume, sometimes producing equally eerie results.