Black holes make noise. That’s not new and NASA has known about it since 2003 because these send out pressure waves that cause ripples of hot gas from the cluster that could translate into a note. So waves are equal to sounds.
That note is not usually heard by humans. But now, thanks to a new sonification, it has been possible to obtain more notes than humans can hear. It was achieved thanks to the translation of astronomical data into sound that NASA is about to launch this year.
This sonification is unlike anything done before because it revisits actual 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 NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope/Goddard Space Flight Center.
How is it possible that there is sound in space?
The popular misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has large amounts of gas that engulf hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for sound waves to travel.
How was it achieved?
In this new sonification of Perseus, sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted and audible for the first time.
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. Another way of expressing this is that it is heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times more than its original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.)
Radar-like scanning around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.
more is coming
In addition to the Perseus cluster of galaxies, a new sonification of another famous black hole is being launched. 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.
If you are interested in more sounds from space and more sonifications of astronomical data, visit the A Universe of Sound website or click here: https://chandra.si.edu/sound/