The POT has shared the shocking sound of a supermassive black hole and it’s one of the weirdest and most terrifying things we could hear.
According to a report published on the website of Nat Geo Spainthe sound corresponds to a group of black holes at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxiesan area in space that is home to thousands of galaxies and is located 250 million light years from Earth.
Astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of waves propagating through the gas surrounding the black hole. It was about sound waves 30,000 light years in diameter and an oscillation period of 10 million years caused by the periodic explosions of the black hole itself.
This grouping of galaxies has a lot of gasthus allowing the sound waves generated by the black hole travel more easily through space. For this reason, the US space agency explains that these particular black holes have been associated with sound.
This is what the supermassive black hole sounds like
The experts discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could translate into a noteone that humans cannot hear, 57 octaves below middle C.
Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new tune, that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound, was released during NASA Black Hole Week.
In this Perseus sonification, sound waves previously identified by astronomers were extracted and audible for the first time. The sound waves were drawn in radial directions, that is, away from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of the human ear by scaling them up 57 and 58 octaves above their actual pitch.
