NASA has released a haunting audio clip of sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole 250 million light-years away.
The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the sound waves emanating from it have been shifted 57 and 58 octaves to be audible to human hearing.
The result (below), released by NASA in May, is a sort of supernatural howl (obviously) that, if we’re being honest, sounds not only scary but a little angry.
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This is whenever that these sound waves first have been extricated and made perceptible. So what’s going on in this plan? We will most likely be unable to hear sounds in space, yet that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
In 2003, astronomers discovered something truly amazing: sound waves propagating through the vast amounts of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, now known for its eerie howls.
We couldn’t hear them at their current pitch. The waves contain the lowest note in the universe ever heard by humans – well below the limits of human hearing.
But this recent sonification not only raised the recording a lot of octaves, it added the notes detected by the black hole, giving us an idea of what they would sound like as they resonated through intergalactic space.
The lowest note, identified as early as 2003, is B, just over 57 octaves below middle C; At this step, its frequency is 10 million years. The lowest sound that man can hear has a frequency of one twentieth of a second.
Sound waves were extracted radially or outward from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus cluster and played counterclockwise from the center,
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permitting us to hear sounds every which way from the supermassive dark opening at pitches 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their unique recurrence.
The result is strange, just like many waves captured from space and transposed into audio frequencies.
However, the noises are not just a scientific curiosity. The thin gas and plasma that drift between galaxies in galaxy clusters — known as the intracluster medium — is denser and much, much hotter than the intergalactic medium outside galaxy clusters.
Acoustic waves propagating through the intracluster medium are one mechanism by which the intracluster medium can be heated as they carry energy through the plasma.
Therefore, since temperatures help regulate star formation, sound waves could play a crucial role in the evolution of galaxy clusters over long timescales.
This heat also allows us to detect sound waves. Since the intracluster medium is so hot, it shines brilliantly in X-beams.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory initially enabled not only the detection of sound waves, but also the sonification project.
Another famous supermassive black hole also got the sonication treatment. M87*, the first black hole ever imaged directly in a colossal effort by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration,
was also imaged by other instruments at the same time. These incorporate Chandra for X-beams, Hubble for noticeable light, and Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array for radio frequencies.
These images showed a colossal jet of matter shooting out of space just outside the supermassive black hole at speeds that appear faster than light in a vacuum (it’s an illusion, but cool). And now they too have been sonified.
To be clear, these data were not initially sound waves like the Perseus audio, but light at different frequencies. Radio data has the lowest pitch in sound reinforcement at the lowest frequencies. Optical data is mid-range, X-ray at the top.
Turning visual data like this into sound can be an interesting new way to discover cosmic phenomena, and the method also has scientific value.
Sometimes transforming a dataset can reveal hidden details that allow for more detailed discoveries about the mysterious and vast universe around us.
