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free__coffee t1_ja24fvs wrote

Reply to comment by DemonOfTheAstroWaste in Explosions in space movies? by DemonOfTheAstroWaste

Further - there would be sound. There is a hot ball of expanding gas coming from the explosion, moving in all directions. It wouldn't be as loud as an earth explosion would be, but certainly some air particles from the explosion are going to hit your eardrums

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ForceUser128 t1_ja29lrl wrote

Due to distances involved though, any sound would be delayed similar to a lightning strike on earth, but much worse because there is no real medium for the sound waves to propagate through but rather the atmos and molecules themselves moving through mostly empty space.

Also, at best, you might hear a thud rather than an explosion due to you being contained in a sealed, pressurised container (aka a ship). And even then, it'd more likely be from solid debri rather than from the very sparse (comparatively) atoms and molecules of an explosion.

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exceive t1_ja3crwu wrote

You might hear something at the same time you see it. That would be the sounds your ship makes when a whole bunch of electromagnetic energy hits it suddenly. Maybe a rattle or thud as your hull abruptly and unevenly expands just a little bit from heat. Maybe some weird noise if your ship is accidentally a radio receiver. A lot of things are accidentally radio receivers if the signal is strong enough.

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ForceUser128 t1_ja3jrw6 wrote

True, didnt think about other forms that 'light'(radiation) can take, like radio, xrays, etc and what effect that would have on the ship itself.

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codeedog t1_ja3000m wrote

There would be no sound in the vacuum of space unless the two ships were next to each other. The gas molecules would dissipate rapidly. The density of the gas ball would fall off at around 1/r^3. The energy of the wave front would normally expand at 1/r^2 in an atmosphere which provides a medium for energy transfer. However, in space and without a gas medium, the “sound” must travel with the gas or other materials from the explosion and they dissipate rapidly (r-cubed) or stay as chunks of broken spaceship.

So, unless a chunk of exploded spaceship hit your ship, you wouldn’t hear any sound.

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