Science off the Sphere: Space Soundwaves

Don demonstrates water oscillations on a speaker in microgravity, and
ZZ Top rocks the boat 250 miles above Earth.

Answer the challenge question at www.physicscentral.com/sots for a chance to win a prize and have your name read from space!

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Jason Weitzel]

Screw playing Madison Square Garden...having your music played in space to a 0 gravity science experiment is now officially the coolest thing I think can be done with my music! Time to sneak a CD onto a Soyuz!

[mrxfhd]

i think that low frequencies would mean less energy and further peaks of the wave , thus you are able to observe more clearly what happens to the droplet , if it was a high frequency it would be chaotic since the wave peaks are close , or because you just don't want your ears to bleed from the high frequencies :p

[Previo Iman Prakasa]

have you guys done with Magnetic Experiment in 0G ?

[XerosXIII]

that was two months ago.. would shoot myself if they did now..

[sainkun]

Meh, too mainstream...

[RichHeschl]

More energy, at the same sound pressure level lower frequency sounds displace more because the wavelength is longer.

It's quite an interesting system, the water is damping the speaker cone but it acts as a resonant body itself, but the Q factor is variable because the damping results from turbulence.

The first high mass droplet appears to form a vortex, but I'm not sure if that's an artifact of the sampling rate of the camera.

I want to see some waveforms with some higher harmonics played

[XerosXIII]

they need to play Gangnam style to see what it does

[Moises Soriano]

Suuure they grey cover fell off, lol xD

[voltageclamp2001]

It’s so refreshing to hear an American use metric units. 

[George Syrimis]

Low frequencies will get the water to oscillate better due to the longer wavelengths.

[NuclearTeapot37]

It's very much like a microwave, the frequencies that cause resonance for the water molecules are very low. If high frequencies were used, the oscillations would go put of phase and resonance won't occur.

[tlspecs]

On-orbit flash pots.