NASA reports recording the sound of a Black Hole

Although many believed sound in space just wasn’t possible, NASA has dismissed this myth, releasing a new video allowing the world to hear what the black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster sounds like.

Building on sound waves astronomers earlier extracted, this new sonification — translated from astronomical data — makes them audible for the first time, having been released amid NASA’s Black Hole Week this year.

“In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates from the fact that most of the space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel,” as per a release from NASA.

Surprisingly, sound has been connected with this black hole since 2003, after astronomers discovered it sent out pressure waves that produced ripples in the cluster’s hot gas. However, as per the space agency, the discovery indicated we humans aren’t actually able to hear 57 octaves below middle C.

“The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the centre. The signals were then re-synthesised into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillions and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency,” the release continued.

Source: Agencies