The Loudest Sound, Naturally
The loudest sound in recorded history came from the volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island Krakatoa at 10.02 a.m. on August 27, 1883. The explosion caused two thirds of the island to collapse and formed tsunami waves as high as 46 m (151 ft) rocking ships as far away as South Africa.
At 194 dB, the energy in the sound waves starts distorting and they create a complete vacuum between themselves. The sound is no longer moving through the air, but is in fact pushing the air along with it, forming a pressurized wall of moving air.
Noise above 70 dB over a prolonged period of time may start to damage your hearing. Loud noise above 120 dB can cause immediate harm to your ears.
The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it's inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.”
First 1000 dB is a physical impossibility, anything over 150dB would burst your eardrums, anything over 194dB is no longer sound and anything over 200dB is fatal.
Hailey et al.) For the first time in history, earthlings can hear what a black hole sounds like: a low-pitched groaning, as if a very creaky heavy door was being opened again and again.
Yes, it can! Sound can kill you in multiple ways. If we're talking about sounds within the human hearing frequency range (between 20 and 20,000 Hz), high-intensity sounds above 150 decibels can burst your eardrums, while sounds above 185 dB can impact your inner organs and cause death.
Silence is the loudest sound in the universe, because it's the only thing that makes you stop and look around. Because silence is what we all fear.
120 – 140 decibels: Such as, a rock concert, auto racing, or a hammer pounding a nail. 125 – 155 decibels: Like, firecrackers or fireworks, or a jet engine. 170 – 190 decibels: For example, a shot gun blast or a rocket lift off.
Apparently, a sound of 1,100 decibels would create so much energy, it would act as a immensely high quantity of mass. This would, in turn, create enough gravity to form an extremely large black hole! Larger, in fact, than our observable universe.
A sperm whale's click is 200 decibels, the unit used to measure the intensity of a sound, said Jennifer Miksis-Olds, associate professor of acoustics at Penn State.
The loudest controlled manmade sounds in history were produced this week--not by a rock band, but by a physicist.
150 decibels is usually considered enough to burst your eardrums, but the threshold for death is usually pegged at around 185-200 dB.
310 decibels is loud enough to kill you. Ear drums rupture between 150 and 160 decibels. That means Krakatoa was exponentially higher on the decibel scale as a sound high enough to cause your ear drums to literally explode.
Any noise exceeding 70 dB is considered disturbing. Residential limits usually start at 60 or 55 dB (the equivalent noise of a regular vacuum cleaner). Time limits usually apply after 10 pm and until 7 am.
Light does not really affect sound. Sound is made of vibrations (aka rapid pressure fluctuations) in air, water, or solid material.
Black noise is a type of noise where the dominant energy level is zero throughout all frequencies, with occasional sudden rises; it is also defined as silence.
A nuclear bomb.
Decibel meters set 250 feet away from test sites peaked at 210 decibels. The sound alone is enough to kill a human being, so if the bomb doesn't kill you, the noise will. Fun fact!
A sonic black hole, sometimes called a dumb hole or acoustic black hole, is a phenomenon in which phonons (sound perturbations) are unable to escape from a region of a fluid that is flowing more quickly than the local speed of sound.
German researcher Jurgen Altmann showed that a blast of 210 decibels or more affects the inner organs — the lungs — and could cause internal injury that could lead to death.
The answer might surprise you, as solar physicists estimate that the solar surface noise would be approximately 100dB by the time it reaches Earth! The enormity of the sun's surface paired with its capability of generating of tens of thousands of watts of sound energy per meter makes the sun astronomically loud.
So then, zero decibels is the smallest level of sound our ears can detect! So there's our answer, in its simplest form.
Human screams can be quite loud, possibly exceeding 100 dB (as of March 2019, the world record is 129 dB!) —but you probably want to avoid that because screams that loud can hurt your ears!