You can’t hear a black hole screaming in space, but you can obviously hear it singing.
In 2003, astrophysicists working with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered a wave pattern in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves — sound waves — 30,000 light-years in diameter and emitted through the thin, ultra-hot gas that filled galaxy clusters. They are caused by periodic explosions of a supermassive black hole in the center of a bowl 250 million light-years away that contains thousands of galaxies.
With an oscillation period of 10 million years, the sound waves are acoustically equivalent to B-flat 57 octaves below the average C, a tone that the black hole has apparently maintained for the past two billion years. Astronomers suspect that these waves act as a brake on star formation, keeping the gas in the bowl too hot to condense into new stars. Chandra’s astronomers recently “sonified” these waves, speeding up signals to 57 or 58 octaves above their original height, increasing their frequency by quadrillion times to make them audible to the human ear. As a result, the rest of us can now hear the intergalactic sirens singing.
Through these new space headphones, Perseus’ black hole emits ominous moans and rumbles that remind the listener of the glaring tones of an alien radio signal that Jody Foster hears through headphones in the science fiction film Contact.
All this is the result of “Black Hole Week”, an annual NASA social media extravaganza, May 2-6.
© 2022 The New York Times News Service
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