The mystery of the strange sound that a Chinese astronaut reported in space

Yang Liwei went down in history as the first astronaut that China managed to send into outer space. His maiden mission, carried out in 2003, brought recognition, but also aroused the curiosity of the scientific community for an unusual sound that, according to him, he heard during his space journey.

According to Liwei, in dialogue with China Central Television, he heard a strange sound while he was in the ship, millions of kilometers from the earth’s surface.

“It came neither from outside nor from inside the spacecraft, but it sounded like someone was hitting the body of the spacecraft, like hitting an iron bucket with a wooden hammer.”reported the also military pilot.

Yang, who later became a colonel in China’s air force, took off on Oct. 15, 2003 from the Jiuquan base in the Gobi desert between northern China and southern Mongolia.

(Also read: This was the first golf game in history to be played on the Moon).

Aboard the Shenzhou 5 capsule, he circled the Earth 14 times before landing as the protagonist of a historic feat for his nation, which became the third to send humans into space, after the Soviet Union and the United States.

According to the international media People’s Daily Onlinethe flight lasted 21 hours, in which the astronaut traveled through outer space and also captured the particular sound. Once the knocking made its sudden appearance, Liwei decided to approach the hatch of the ship to try to identify the source of the noise. However, he was not lucky.

When the air navigator landed on Earth, almost a day after taking off, he did not want to be left with doubts. Quite the contrary, in an attempt to find an explanation for the sound, he explained the noises to space program officials and even tried to imitate them with instruments.

Although Liwei did not hear the sound exactly again, apparently the astronauts aboard Shenzhou 6 and Shenzhou 7 did. “Before entering space, I told you that the sound is a normal phenomenon, so that there is no need to worry,” said the pilot, according to the aforementioned media.

Aliens? The theories of the strange sound

After Liwei’s statements came to light, the scientific community set about finding reasonable answers. While some suggested that the sound could have been caused by extraterrestrial activity, there were experts who found much more mundane explanations.

The specialized magazine reverse, which is part of the Bustle Digital Group, for example, decided to go to NASA a few years ago to find out how common it was to hear this type of noise among American astronauts. Faced with this questioning, the agency responded: “To our knowledge, there have been no reports of such sounds.”

(Keep reading: Space Alert: The Day an Astronaut Floated Unprotected.)

For Professor Goh Cher Hiang, an expert in space engineering from the National University of Singapore (United States), in dialogue with ‘BBC Mundo’, the sound responded to a physical blow that Liwei’s spacecraft was receiving. While for his colleague Wee-Seng Soh, the answer lay in the expansion or contraction properties of the ship.

“(The sound) could be the result of the expansion or contraction of the ship, especially when the temperature outside it could have changed considerably once it entered orbit,” Soh explained to the aforementioned medium.

It was not until 2016 that Liwei broke the silence and revealed another possible explanation for the noises he heard, in the middle of an event at a school in the eastern city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province.

(Of interest: Woman fell in love with ‘astronaut’ and paid him rocket to return to Earth).

According to ‘China Daily’, the astronaut said the shocks were the result of the drop in air pressure, which caused changes in the structure of the spacecraft as it left Earth for space. “I think it’s normal. It is necessary to carefully identify the cause,” Liwei said at the time.

This theory caught the attention of space scientist Liu Hong, who agreed that the sound could come from deformations in the materials on the inner wall of the space capsule due to changes in pressure.

Together with a team of researchers, they managed to determine that “a change in the temperature of the capsule would cause a change in the air pressure, and the pressure difference between the inner and outer walls of the capsule generated small deformations in the wall materials, producing the sound Dong! Dong! Dong!

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