During black hole week, in May, NASA released a remix that will haunt you until the end of your days.
Specifically, the space agency has created a melody from the sound waves of a massive black hole located more than 200 million light-years from Earth. The black hole is located at the center of what is known as the Perseus galaxy cluster, which is a magnificent cluster of galaxies 11 million light- and shrouded in hot gas.
And while the sheer size of Perseus and its galaxies is impressive, astronomers were more interested in all that hot gas. The space clouds are precisely the reason we can hear the sounds from something we can barely see or imagine: the massive black hole at the center of Perseus.
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It's probably exactly what you'd expect a black hole to sound like: Eerie, scary, mysterious, maybe something Thom Yorke for his next album. Maybe even painful, if you listen closely enough.
Anyway, now that you have NASA's black hole week soundtrack, here are the details of what you're hearing.
Decades ago, astronomers discovered that the interior of Perseus emits pressure waves. These waves are carried through the hot gas in the region. The ripples caused in the hot gas can be translated into sound.
Think of sound waves as the vibration of air — or rather, the vibration of the elements (atoms, molecules) within the air. Our ears can pick up these vibrations and convert them into audible noise here on Earth, but in space, things are a little different.
Because space is empty, there is no medium for sound waves to travel through. That's why space is considered completely quiet. But the silence isn't because cosmic objects don't make sounds. Their waves simply have nothing to vibrate against.
The Perseus black hole, on the other hand, overcomes this space-time sound barrier because it is so close to the cluster's gas. It can create sound wave vibrations made up of the undulations of the hot gases, which NASA scientists are focusing on using to create the eerie soundtrack.
So in 2003, a team from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory took astronomical data from the airwaves and translated them into the regular sound waves we're used to on Earth. But for a long time, there was a big obstacle preventing us from hearing NASA's soundtrack to the black hole. When the scientists completed the translation, or sounding, process, they found that the Perseus Abyss plays a note that is 57 octaves below middle C.
Our human ears can't hear this, here comes the NASA remix.
In honor of black hole week, the organization extracted the already identified sound waves of the black hole and scaled them by 57 and 58 octaves, so that we can finally all hear the sound of the void.
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"Another way to put this," NASA said, "is that the sound waves sound 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher in the remix than their original frequency."
And, as an added bonus, NASA has also released another, much less ominous, remix of a black hole. This hole is the abyss at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, famous for being the first “void” ever photographed.
This soundtrack, however, is so beautiful because it’s not exactly the product of pure, isolated astronomical data processing like the music of the Perseus void. It comes from three different data containers — Chandra X-rays, optical light from Hubble , and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile — that overlap with each other.
The X‑rays play high tones, the optical light data play mid tones, and the radio waves are the alto with the lowest tones.
Together they create a sweet‑bitter symphony.
Source: cnet.com
