Since 2003, scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have revealed the different sounds that exist in space. Now him sound of a black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster has been released as part of NASA Black Hole Week 2022.
This is how the new sound emitted by a black hole is heard, published by NASA:
To get this new sound from space, astronomers extracted the sound waves, for the first time audible and previously identified.
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.
This means that sound waves are heard 44 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
- A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.
A radar-like scan around the image allows you to listen to waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, both blue and purple show X-ray data captured by Chandra.
According to experts, this new black hole sound it’s unlike anything done before because it revisits real sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
These sonifications were conducted by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) and included as part of NASA’s Universe of Learning (UoL) program with additional support from the Hubble Space Telescope/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Other space sounds
Besides of perseus cluster of galaxiesis launching a new sonification of another famous black hole, 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 sound of space does not present the EHT data, but instead looks at data from other telescopes that observed M87 on much larger scales at about the same time.
Sounds in space, how do they originate?
The popular idea that there are no sounds in space is wrong. say experts, who explain that this belief originated from the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, so there is no medium for sound waves to propagate.
However, galaxy clusters, on the other hand, have large amounts of gas that engulf hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for sound waves to travel.
In the case of black holes, The sound is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole cause ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that can be translated into a note that humans can’t hear about 57 octaves below middle C.