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Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. That’s 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 note — one that humans can’t hear at about 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this. black hole sound machine This new sonification, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound, will be launched for the Black Hole Week of the NASA this year.
In some ways, this sonification is unlike anything done before because it revisits actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has large amounts of gas that engulf hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for sound waves to travel.
In this new 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 boosting them 57 and 58 octaves above their actual pitch. Another way of expressing this is that it is heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times more than its original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image lets you hear waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, both blue and purple show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
In addition to the Perseus cluster of galaxies, a new sonification of another famous black hole is being launched. Studied by scientists for decades, the black hole in Messier 87, or M87, gained celebrity status in science after the first launch of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2019. This new sonification does not present the EHT data, but which appears in data from other telescopes that observed M87 on much larger scales at about the same time. The visual format image contains three panels that are, from top to bottom, X-rays from Chandra, optical light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. The brighter region on the left of the image is where the black hole is located, and the structure on the upper right is a jet produced by the black hole. The jet is produced by material falling onto the black hole. Sonification scans the image in three levels from left to right, with each wavelength assigned to a different range of audible tones. Radio waves are assigned to lower tones, optical data to midtones, and X-rays detected by Chandra to higher tones. The brightest part of the image corresponds to the noisiest part of the sonification, which is where astronomers find the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole that the EHT captured.
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