Space research has not only advanced to obtain visual records of black holes, but has also been able to demonstrate what they sound like. The POT has shared the shocking “sound” of a black hole and it’s one of the weirdest things we could hear.
The sound corresponds to a group of black holes at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxiesan area in space that is home to thousands of galaxies and that is 250 million light years from Earth, according to the report on the website of Free Press.
This group of galaxies has a lot of gasso it allows the sound waves generated by the black hole travel more easily through space. For this reason, the US space agency explains that these particular black holes have been associated with sound.
This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a noteone that humans cannot hear, 57 octaves below middle C.
How does a black hole sound?
Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new tune, i.e. the translation of astronomical data into sound, was released during NASA’s Black Hole Week this year, shared by the Twitter account of NASA Exoplanets.
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
In this sonification of Perseus, sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted and audible for the first time. 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 scaling them up 57 and 58 octaves above their actual pitch.
The popular misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum. However, a galaxy cluster has large amounts of gas that engulf hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for sound waves to travel.