It is an exceptional soundtrack shared by NASA: that of the melody emitted by a black hole located nearly 250 million light-years from Earth. Sound in space? Impossible. It is indeed a bit more complicated than that.
The black hole the scientists looked at is located at the center of a constellation, known as the Perseus Cluster, which is made up of hundreds of galaxies shrouded in hot gas. A particularly important detail, reports the New York Times.
Normally, sound does not propagate in a vacuum, so it is impossible to “listen to space”. But in this cluster, the gases that surround all these galaxies allow the waves emitted by the black hole to propagate. These ripples in the hot gas had been translated as early as 2003 into musical notes by NASA researchers, but their sounds had proven inaudible to the human ear. Till today.
A song now audible
Thanks to Chandra X-ray Space Observatory, astronomers have increased the frequency of these waves by millions of billions of times. Result, the song of the black hole is now audible.
Since good news never comes alone, NASA has also released audio from, again, space. This time, it is a black hole located in the heart of the huge galaxy M87around 53.5 million light years. The sound clip is the result of the superimposition of content captured by X-rays from Chandra, optical light from Hubble and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, specified CNET. A soundtrack much more bewitching than that of the black hole of Perseus!