OtterKnow Kids EncyclopediaSpace is completely silent! There is no sound in outer space at all. That means if you clapped your hands in space, nobody could hear it. It would be the quietest place you have ever been.
Sound needs air or water to travel through. When you talk, your voice makes the air wiggle, and those wiggles reach other people’s ears. But space is mostly empty with no air at all. So sound waves have nothing to travel through! Inside a spacecraft there is air, so astronauts can talk to each other normally.
- In movies, you can hear spaceships zoom by, but in real life space is totally quiet.
- Astronauts use radios to talk to each other during spacewalks because sound cannot travel through their helmets to the outside.
- Even a giant explosion in space would make no sound!
