Listen to it here!
singing
Is it a car that is accelerating? Crying group of sinners in Purgatory?
It’s easy enough to see how anyone could mistake the somewhat horrifying black hole sounds that NASA just recorded and released on its official YouTube channel on Wednesday. The black hole is at the center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, whose sounds NASA has been studying since 2003.
The clip below uses “sonifcation” to translate pressure waves sent by the black hole into a tone. NASA said the common misconception that space does not contain any sound is only true in places where space is a vacuum and does not provide a medium for sound waves to move through. On the other hand, a cluster of galaxies contains gas that encases hundreds or even thousands of galaxies inside, giving the sound a medium.
Feeling normal
Humans sure love the scary sounds of nature — look at the popularity of whale song and even the machines that help mushrooms’ speak. But it’s hard to get the “voices” out of space, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory made sure to tell some pretty cool facts about the effort to create the 34-second clip in a release about the project.
The team observed the black hole’s existence between 1999 and 2009 and then re-selected the sound of sound waves so that humans could hear them. The sounds were measured at 57 and 58 octaves above the true pitch, or about 7 piano lengths, and the team spent more than 416 hours in total observation time to get the job done.
Hats off to this dedicated team as they have gone so far as to be appalled by the creepy cosmic chatter.
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