How does sound travel in space?
Contrary to what many might believe, and despite the fact that most of it is made up of a great void, sound does exist in space. But, for these waves to be able to travel, there are certain requirements. For example, large amounts of gas present in the thousands of galaxies.
This time, the researchers found that pressure waves sent out by this black hole caused ripples in the hot gas of the Perseus galaxy cluster, producing a sound that struck a note.
Sonification made it possible
The note that emerged in the analyzes of the black hole is about 57 octaves below middle C. Because humans do not have the ability to perceive this note, the researchers managed to adapt the sound to be able to hear it.
The technique known as “sonification”, which is understood as the translation of astronomical data into sound, allowed more notes to be contributed, making it possible to hear them.
quadrillion octaves higher
This sonification allowed the captured waves to be resynthesized in the range of human hearing, scaling them 57 and 58 octaves above their real pitch, put in figures, it is heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than its original frequency ( A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000).
Although this is not the first sonification ever performed, there is no other performed before that resembles it, because the real sound waves that were recorded by the CXC were reviewed.