How does a black hole sound? In science fiction movies, they usually sound terribly sinister, but in reality it’s as strange as synthesizer music.
NASA has released a new “sonication” of black hole waves in the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster.
It has been associated with sound since 2003 because astronomers have discovered that pressure waves sent from a black hole cause waves in the cluster’s hot gas, which can be translated into a note – the lowest in the universe.
The emitted note is the one that people cannot hear at about 57 octaves below the middle C.
Now a new sonication brings more notes to this sound hole machine.
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In a sense, this sonication is different from any other made before (1, 2, 3, 4), as it reviews the actual sound waves found in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The popular misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of the space is essentially a vacuum that does not provide an environment for the propagation of sound waves.
The galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has abundant amounts of gas that envelop hundreds or even thousands of galaxies in it, providing an environment for sound waves to travel.
In this new sonication of Perseus, sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted and heard for the first time.
The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outside the center.
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The signals were then re-synthesized in the range of human hearing, increasing them by 57 and 58 octaves above their true height. A
Another way of saying this is that they sound 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.
In the visual image of this data, blue and purple show X-ray data taken by Chandra.
The brightest part of the image corresponds to the strongest part of the sonication, where astronomers found the black hole with 6.5 billion solar masses that EHT depicted.
More sound astronomical data, as well as additional information about the process, can be found on the website “A Universe of Sound”
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