NASA has recorded and published the mysterious sounds of a black hole. They come from pressure waves emanating from the black hole.
The tones, which are as beautiful as they are creepy, have been raised 57 octaves for people to hear.
Another type of black hole sonification has even been translated into music. You can listen to both in this article.
The vacuum of space is considered silent. But the US space agency Nasa has discovered that black holes emit noise. Prepared for the human ear, they sound quite mysterious and uncannily beautiful.
NASA announced on Twitter on Monday an audio clip with the sounds They come from pressure waves emanating from a black hole. Here you can listen to it.
“The misconception that there is no sound in space stems from the fact that most of space is a vacuum where sound waves cannot propagate. There is so much gas in a galaxy cluster that we actually hear sound,” NASA tweeted.
However, the actual sound is outside the human hearing range 57 octaves below middle C. The Chandra X-ray Observatory recorded data on visible X-ray waves in the Perseus spiral arm of the Milky Way, which correspond to inaudible sounds. NASA then scaled the sounds from their actual pitch to a value humans can hear.
NASA already had the audio clip on its website in May releasedbut the tweet alone provoked many reactions.
“It’s great, and really, really scary.” wrote CNN anchor Jim Sciutto also on Twitter.
Canadian actress Elizabeth Bowen compared notes with “the scene in the movie where someone accidentally stumbles upon some kind of satanic cult in the middle of the woods”
“Everyone talks about how scary this is, but to me the way it cuts is by far the scariest part.” said astronomy blogger Phil Plait.
When this clip was first published, NASA also shared another edit of noise data from M87, the black hole featured in the first black hole photograph taken by the Event Horizon Telescope project in 2019.
The music is also derived from X-ray data from the Chandra telescope, but includes audio interpretations of optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. NASA combined this data into music.
The loudest part of the music in M87 corresponds to the brightest part of the image, right where the black hole is.
The article first appeared on Business Insider on dhe usa You can find the original here.
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