I know that there's no sound in space. However...

I know that there's no sound in space. However, if an astronaut managed to climb onto the side of a space ship and banged on a hatch with a big wrench or similar object, would the people inside (with life support inside the spaceship) be able to hear the banging?

Yes.

Provided the life support included an atmosphere, yes, of course.

Yes. Obviously.

This needed to be asked?

Sound transfers via molecules - of air, liquids, solids. It won't transfer throughvoid, but it will transfer through metal and whatever ship's hull is made of
Why do you ask? Is there a story behind this question?

The reason there's no sound in space is because there's nothing to transmit the sound. No air or other gas. You'd hear yourself, your radio, and muffled versions of your movement because sound is transmitted through your body and into your inner ear.

Inside the station, which is filled with breathable air, there's plenty of gas to transmit the sound.

> Veeky Forums - science & math

They'd be able to hear the banging, but not any of the screams unless the astronaut hugged their whole body along the hull and screamed really fucking loud.

Unless inside the spacecraft is a vacuum seal that physically and wholly separates the crew from the outer hull with a layer of vacuum,

the people inside it would be able to hear ASSUMING THEY WERE CLOSE ENOUGH TO HEAR IT.

The crew of a space ship will hear when some cooling fan goes from 500 rpm to 800 rpm. The trick will be finding a structural part you can hit with a wrench without breaking it. Space ships are light, almost flimsy. And if you rattle on some Whipple shield thrice discoupled from the structural hull it might not carry.

How is this Veeky Forums related?

I could use it in a setting.

Oh yes, that's the problem: threads that only discuss fluff.

Because there's no way knowing this can be used in a space horror game.

a more interesting question is: are there nebulas/gas clouds thick enough to transmit some amount of sound

Wow! No. Not by orders of magnitude.

Nebula just means the sky is slightly brighter. You would need optical machinery to measure the slight increase in particle density.

Many of the objects originally seen as nebulae have turned out to be galaxies or even clusters.

Also: asteroid fields aren't dense like in Star Wars, they're thin like the space between Mar's and Jupiter's orbit.

Note that banging on the side of a space station is really hard without some handholds - basically the astronaut would experience a force pushing him away from the

Nope, nebulas are gaseous objects with, admittedly, more gas in them than our entire solar system, but it's spread over dozens of light years.

So diffuse is the gas in a nebula that while, from a vast distance the nebula seems quite substantial and opaque even, from within the nebula you wouldn't know you were inside one because space would seem so clear (though astronomy would find a notable lack of infra-red wavelength suns in the sky and all the stars outside the nebula would have a faint blue/white shift to their spectroscopic values.

You've also got to bear in mind that most nebulas are stellar nurseries, so you'll have a fuck ton of ultra near suns within a few lightyears of you too so the night sky is a bit brighter than usual.

though not quite as bright as in the galactic core, where suns are less than a light-year from each other and dance strange decade dances along magnetic field lines with streamers of hydrogen and helium that twitch and flow in coruscant scintillating arcs through the sky. And then shudder as you look across from the magnetar conga lines over to the dark sun orchestrating it all when it occasionally becomes visible behind the wall of remnant quasars that dance on hour long paths around it, and the cold fire that ate a thousand thousand suns across the eaons winks hungrily at the small x-ray scarred ball of wax you stand upon nakedly, with only thin wisps of gas between you and the monstrous heart of a billion billion starred galaxy.

>basically the astronaut would experience a force pushing him away from the

Space station, which even if you held on to something would just cause you to swing back and forth around the hand hold and smashing your body back and forth upon the hull of the space station.

>be able to hear the banging?
I believe so as the ship's hull would behave like a drum, with the vibrating plating sending sound waves into the environmentally-controlled interior.

>astronomy would find a notable lack of infra-red wavelength suns in the sky and all the stars outside the nebula would have a faint blue/white shift to their spectroscopic values.
I cannot confirm this

It's for an upcoming science fiction game I plan on running.