Myth Debunked: Do radio telescopes ‘hear sound’ from space?
What they collect is light, not cosmic noise in the everyday sense
They do not. Space is almost entirely a vacuum, so sound cannot travel through it in the ordinary way. Radio telescopes detect electromagnetic waves, not audio.
These waves are part of the same broad family as visible light, infrared and X-rays, but at much longer wavelengths.
Astronomers convert those signals into images, measurements and sometimes even sonified versions for public outreach, which is why the confusion persists.
The science is still very real but what radio telescopes collect is light, not cosmic noise in the everyday sense.