Have you ever wondered what a black hole sounds like? If so, there is finally an answer. On August 21, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tweeted a 34-second audio clip of the sound of a black hole, located more than 240 million light years away. from the earth.
This black hole sits at the center of the Perseus cluster, a collection of nearly 200 galaxies enveloped in “hot gas” that allows sound to travel.
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates from the fact that most of space is a vacuum, which does not allow sound waves to travel. A cluster of galaxies has so much gas that we have picked up real sound. Here it is amplified and mixed with other data to hear a black hole!
Through a release Issued last May, the agency explained that since 2003, scientists have known the area is filled with sound after pressure waves sent out by the black hole “caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could translate into a note”.
However, the note was one that the human ear cannot pick up, as it is the lowest in the universe ever detected, so it was necessary to use technology to interpret the sound. Using a sonification technique, scientists were able to extract sound waves from the black hole and make them audible for the first time this year.
To achieve this, the sound waves were drawn in radial directions, that is, away from the center. The signals were then resynthesized to the range of human hearing by boosting them 57 and 58 octaves above their actual pitch.
Furthermore, this sonification has not only raised the recording many octaves, but has also added to the notes detected from the black hole, so we can get an idea of what they would sound like, resonating through intergalactic space.
Another way of saying this is that it is heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times more than its original frequency.
These sonifications were conducted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXC) and included as part of NASA’s Universe of Learning (UoL) program. More sonifications of astronomical data, as well as additional information about the process, can be found on the website A Universe of Sound.
Source: Okchicas
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