For all practical purposes on Earth, the speed of sound is constant. It might change slightly depending on where you are, and we all know sound can be tricky when people start messing with acoustics. But what about on other planets.
Some researchers at the University of Southhampton decided to do the physics grunt work and discovered essentially that on other planet, our voices would be so distorted it’d mess with our minds.
Take Venus. It has a thick atmosphere, so our vocal chords would vibrate much more slowly, giving you a deep voice. But the speed of sound on Venus is a lot faster, and apparently that would make our brains think the speaker is tiny.
This is mostly done as a gimmick for a planetarium, but it’s still pretty cool to know how sound works on other planets. Also to imagine Barry-White Smurf.
image via Malkav on Flickr