NASA has released a haunting audio clip of a supermassive black hole sound waves that located 250 million light years away. The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the sound waves it emits are transposed 57 and 58 octaves up to be audible to the human ear.
What Does The Black Hole Sound Waves Sound like?
In 2003, astronomers discovered something truly amazing. It's a supermassive black hole sound waves which propagating through the mass of gas surrounding that located at the center of the Perseus cluster and it is known for its eerie wails.
The waves contain the lowest sounds in the universe that humans have ever heard, well below the limits of human hearing. However, this recent sonification not only lifted the recordings by quite an octave, but also added sounds detected by black holes, giving us the feeling of rumbling through intergalactic space.
The thin gas and plasma drifting between galaxies within clusters namely the intracluster medium is denser and much hotter than the intergalactic medium outside the cluster. Sound waves may therefore play an important role in the evolution of galaxy clusters on long timescales, as temperature helps regulate star formation. This heat also allows us to detect sound waves.
M87* was the first black hole to be directly imaged in a large-scale effort in collaboration with Event Horizon Telescope, as well as by other instruments such as Chandra X-ray Observatory for X-rays, Hubble for visible light, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array for radio wavelengths.
These images show huge jets of matter erupting from space just outside a supermassive black hole at speeds that appear to be faster than light in a vacuum. To be clear, this data was originally light at various frequencies, not sound waves like Perseus Audio. Converting such visual data into sound could be a cool new way to experience cosmic phenomena, and it also has scientific value. Transforming datasets can sometimes reveal hidden details and enable more detailed discoveries about the mysterious and vast universe around us.
