thought this was kind of humorous

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/09/09/black_hole030909

from the good ole boys at the canadian broadcasting corporation

Uh, hate to ask the obvious, but how does sound travel in space?

The link doesn't seem to work...

Here's the fixed link:

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/09/09/black_hole030909

Hmmm. Infrasound has been blamed for causing anxiety and feelings of paranoia. Maybe this thing is to blame for all humanity's problems???

Sound is a vibration of some medium, like air. Vacuum or emptiness has a density of zero — thus no sound.
But a black hole has high density thus possible sound. My guess. Lets ask the scientists....

Although I do science as my day job, I know astrophysics no better than you guys. That said, here are my $0.02 reading the news article:

(1) They are talking about a sound wave at frequencies in the order of 0.000000000000001 Hz (10^-15 Hz) -- if you still call it a "sound" wave. In other words, the cycle period of this sound is ~10 million years.

(2) The "medium" for this sound wave is apparently the plasma gas jetting out from a black hole.

(3) This far-subsonic sound wave has never actually reached the earth. Instead, they indirectly observed the existence of sound wave by observing a modulation of X-ray and other radiations shooting toward us from the plasma jets surrounding the black hole.

(4) I don't think any subwoofer lasts one cycle period of this sound.

That conclusion makes sense to me. Thanks sushi.

Analogous to that, I suppose special equipment located on an orbiting Space Shuttle would be able to detect certain sound waves down on Earth even though it would be completely inaudible in space.

I am just questioning the term "sound" when related to this. I suppose it could be called that, but it just seems like oscillation in the plasma stream to me.

Damn, does this sound like Star Trek technobabble to anyone else?

Does a black hole make a sound if there's nobody living there to hear it?

lol!

If Schroedinger's cat has anything to do with it -- yes and no.

Memories of physics class, eh Peter? My own thought is that the little-known paradox of "Einstein's Dog" trumps(blows away?)Scroedinger's analysis of quantum mechanics. Probably my own thoughts on the matter are best summarized in this scientific paper .

Wow...Finally, a post about a hole, and no one with their finger in it...

LOL

In reply to:

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Wow...Finally, a post about a hole, and no one with their finger in it...

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Only because you'd never get your finger back once you probed beyond the event horizon.

I thought that those astrophysicists have always been playing around with the 'hole poking it with their academic fingers...